Oct. 5, 1963: Roscoe Higgins, a 65-year-old Deerfield farmer, is fined $300 and given a suspended jail sentence for selling hard cider at the Deerfield Fair.
Oct. 5, 1817: An earthquake rocks Concord at about 11:40 a.m. It lasts 1-2 minutes.
Oct. 5, 1918: Concord’s Board of Health urges the discontinuation of public funerals because of the Spanish Influenza epidemic, which is at its peak. The board strongly suggests that until further notice only “kinsmen and very near friends attend the last rites of people who die.”
Oct. 5, 1861: The USS Kearsarge is launched at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. The ship is armed with seven guns, has a crew of 162 men, measures 214 feet, 3 inches, and cost $287,000 to build. The controversy over which of New Hampshire’s two Mount Kearsarges the ship is named after is never resolved, even by the U.S. Senate, which takes up the dispute in 1915.
Oct. 6, 2003: In the first action of its kind by any state, New Hampshire is suing 22 oil companies for using a gasoline additive that the attorney general says has polluted much of the state’s water supply. The additive, MtBE, has caused “an unprecedented and significant groundwater contamination problem,” Attorney General Peter Heed says at a press conference.
Oct. 6, 2002: Bishop John McCormack confronts angry parishioners at St. Patrick Church in Jaffrey as he explains why he assigned to the church a priest who had a sexual relationship with a teenage boy during the 1980s.
Oct. 7, 2001: Concord native Tom Mailhot begins the Ward Evans Atlantic Challenge, a 2,900-nautical mile rowing race from the Canary Islands off Africa to Barbados in the Caribbean. Mailhot is a member of the only American team in the race.
Oct. 7, 2000: Concord High quarterback Matt Skoby sets the school record for touchdown passes thrown in a game with five during a 38-10 win over Manchester Central.
Oct. 8, 2001: Concord area cancer patients and their families win a prolonged and sometimes agonizing battle, when a state board approves Concord Hospital’s plan to bring radiation treatments closer to home. The decision clears the way for the hospital to install a $7.8 million radiation device in its new cancer treatment center.
Oct. 8, 1938: Penny Pitou of Gilford is born. She will win two silver medals in skiing in the 1960 Olympics. She will also participate in the 1956 Olympics and be elected to the National Ski Hall of Fame.
Oct. 8, 1869: Franklin Pierce, 14th president of the United States, dies in Concord.
Oct. 8, 1838: The first passenger train rolls into New Hampshire from Lowell, Mass., stopping at a temporary station in Nashua. Two weeks later, freight trains will begin running in New Hampshire.
Oct. 9, 2001: Red River Theatres, a nonprofit organization set on bringing movies back to Concord’s downtown, receives $15,000 from the city council to conduct a feasibility study on whether a downtown movie theater would succeed. The group plans to buy the former Concord Theater building on South Main Street and restore it.
Oct. 9, 1782: Lewis Cass is born in Exeter. He will be educated at Phillips Academy, make his name synonymous with Michigan, serving as governor and U.S. senator, and join Andrew Jackson’s Cabinet as secretary of war. Cass will also author the concept of popular sovereignty, under which new states may choose for themselves whether to enter the Union as slave or free. The idea will hasten the coming of the Civil War.
Oct. 10, 1774: Reacting to the Intolerable Acts and Britain’s closing of Boston Harbor, a special town meeting in Portsmouth votes to send 200 pounds to Boston for poor relief. The amount is four times Portsmouth’s annual province tax. Other New Hampshire towns, including Concord, will soon follow Portsmouth’s example and send money to Boston.
Oct. 11, 2002: Sixteen men who claimed they were sexually abused by Roman Catholic priests when they were boys have settled their lawsuits against the Diocese of Manchester for a combined $950,000, the Monitor reports. The agreement marks the first resolution of 130 complaints of priest sex abuse made during the past year, some of which date back more than 40 years.
Oct, 11. 1894: James M. Langley is born in Hyde Park, Mass. He will be the editor and publisher of the Concord Monitor for four decades, beginning in 1923. He will be instrumental in the campaign to elect Dwight D. Eisenhower president in 1952 and will later serve as Eisenhower’s ambassador to Pakistan.
Oct. 11, 1854: In a closed-door meeting at Concord’s Eagle Hotel, former New Hampshire congressman Edmund Burke leads a group of disenchanted Democrats who vote to repudiate President Franklin Pierce.
