March 4, 1777: Concord’s town meeting votes to “break off all dealings” with attorney Peter Green, Dr. Phillip Carrigain and merchants John Stevens and Nathaniel Green. Although the four are among 156 area men who have signed the Association Test, an oath of loyalty to the Patriot cause, they are suspected of being Tories.
March 4, 1834: Mill workers in Dover and Newmarket walk out at mid-morning, the first work stoppage in New Hampshire. The workers, mostly women, were logging 14-hour days, six days a week. The strikes (or “turn-outs,” as they are called) spread from Massachusetts up through New Hampshire.
March 5, 2000: An 8-year-old Manchester girl dies when her father’s pickup truck rolls over on Interstate 89 in Hopkinton. The police say the driver, who may have been fatigued, lost control of the truck.
March 5, 1740: After years of disputes over Massachusetts claims on New Hampshire, King George II approves the boundary between the two colonies. The decision increases New Hampshire’s size by 3,500 square miles and costs Massachusetts 28 chartered towns, including Suncook, Bow, Concord, Penacook, Webster, Salisbury, Dunbarton, Weare, Hopkinton, Warner and Bradford.
March 5, 1975: Attorney General Warren Rudman tells lawmakers that “a boom in crime is the one sure bet casinos will allow us” if New Hampshire legalizes casino gambling.
March 6, 2000: Officials investigating the death of the 73-year-old Concord man known as “Cigar Bob” issue a warrant for the arrest of his former roommate. Dwayne Thompson, 46, who has not been seen since Robert Provencher’s body was found, is charged with second-degree murder.
March 6, 1972: Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, tells a Keene audience that Richard Nixon is no different from his immediate predecessors in lying to the public about U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. “Richard Nixon has killed, wounded or made homeless more than 3 million persons, including 2 million in Cambodia and one third of the population of Laos,” Ellsberg says.
March 7, 1780: Concord town meeting voters elect a prosecutor to find out who “pulled down the house of Andrew Stone, and see what provision they will make for the support of his wife.” Stone was a soldier from Concord in the Continental Army. Apparently in his absence, a town history reports, “one of Stone’s daughters did not behave so well as the neighbors thought a faire and chaste maiden should do and they undertook to correct her manners by pulling the house down. Whether the girl behaved any better afterwards, tradition saith not.”
March 7, 1972: Edmund Muskie of Maine wins the New Hampshire Democratic primary with 46 percent of the vote, but the number falls short of expectations. Runner-up George McGovern gets 37 percent and is perceived as the winner. President Nixon takes 69 percent of the GOP vote with Paul McCloskey and John Ashbrook splitting the rest.
March 7, 1798: Crowds converge on Concord, which has grown to 2,000 inhabitants, to celebrate the ordination of the Rev. Asa McFarland, third minister of the village’s Congregational Church. The church is state-sanctioned and tax-supported. Accepting the call, the 28-year-old McFarland tells townspeople he has prayed that God will make him “an instrument to promote your spiritual happiness.” A grand ball at Stickney’s Tavern, on Main Street just up from the ferry crossing, celebrates the event.
March 7, 1968: Under the headline “Rocky Should Withdraw,” the Union Leader reprints an article from a Roman Catholic magazine on New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce and remarriage. Rockefeller is running for the GOP presidential nomination.
March 7, 1825: A team of horses crossing the frozen Merrimack in Concord falls through the ice.
March 8, 2001: Carolyn Bradley, principal of Concord’s Rundlett Middle School, announces she will resign at the end of the school year. Bradley has earned praise for her work in Concord and elsewhere in the state, but some will most remember her collection of eyeglasses: 13 pairs, a shade to match every suit.
March 8, 1968: In a press release on the Vietnam War, U.S. Sen. Norris Cotton of New Hampshire says: “No longer can honeyed words and cheering predictions conceal the stunning truth – we are taking a beating and can’t win, or at least can’t win under present strategy.”
March 8, 1781: Jeremy Belknap, a clergyman and historian from Dover, writes to his friend Ebenezer Hazard about his plan for an American biographical dictionary. Of George Washington, Belknap writes: “I love men that think justly, and acknowledge the agency of Divine Providence in matters wherein they have a concern. A man is never more truly noble than when he is sensible that he is only a secondary instrument of bringing to pass God’s great design.”
March 8, 1864: Dr. John Martin Gile is born. His surgical skill will one day earn him the nickname “Savior of the North Country.” Gile will practice in Hanover and serve as a member of the Executive Council.
March 8, 1987: Ray Barham’s first column appears in the Concord Monitor. Barham is serving life without parole at New Hampshire State Prison for a 1981 murder.
March 8, 1912: Meldrim Thomson Jr. is born in Pittsburgh, Pa. He will be a three-term New Hampshire governor in the 1970s.
March 9, 1943: A winter for the ages continues as the temperature in Concord falls to 16 below zero. Just three weeks earlier, the city suffered through its coldest day ever recorded, when the mercury fell to 37 below.
March 9, 1621: John Mason of London receives one of the first land grants in New Hampshire.
March 9, 1791: At the Gilmanton town meeting, residents vote to lend Moses Page $30 to help him recover his horse, which was stolen, and to catch the thief.
March 9, 1975: Belmont voters approve Sunday racing at a dog track scheduled to open in July.
March 9, 1786: Gilmanton voters agree to pay $10 bounty for every grown wolf caught.
March 9, 1812: Town meeting voters in Concord declare “that no swine be allowed to run at large on the road from Concord bridge to Boscawen bridge under a penalty to the owner of 25 cents for each offense.”
March 9, 1965: Chichester school district voters approve a budget of more than $100,000 for the first time ever. The result is a $9 increase in the school tax rate, even with assistance from the new state lottery.
March 10, 2002: If there is such a thing as a law designed with noble intent that had results even better than expected, the New Hampshire presidential primary could serve as a prime exhibit, the Monitor reports. Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary of Richard Upton’s brainchild. The law that Upton (then a state representative from Concord) conceived sought to make the votes of New Hampshire citizens really count.
March 10, 1777: The Legislature orders the state’s first constitutional Fast Day, to be celebrated April 16. The holiday will not die out until the 1990s.
March 10, 1863: Ship owner Daniel Marcy, a Copperhead from Portsmouth, is elected to the U.S. Congress from the First District.
March 10, 1852: An amendment on the ballot would overturn the constitutional provision that only Protestants may run for political office in New Hampshire. Voters reject the amendment by a 5-4 majority.
March 10, 1964: Absentee candidate Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, wins the N.H. Republican presidential primary with 36 percent of the vote. Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, who have campaigned hard in the state, take 22 and 21 percent respectively, and write-in Richard Nixon, the former vice president, wins 17 percent.
