June 10, 2003: In their season opener, Concord’s Quarry Dogs eke out a 3-2 win over the Sanford Mainers at Doane Diamond.
June 10, 2001: Merrimack Valley wins the Class I softball championship with a 4-1 victory over Monadnock. It’s the school’s first softball title since 1987.
June 10, 1983: A celebration marks the opening of Eagle Square. Former mayor Martin Gross delivers a poem to mark the occasion. One stanza describes the Eagle Stable, which will soon be open in the Crystal Courtyard, a mini-mall for specialty foods:
Your stable’s stalls, once equine halls,
soon hungry souls will seek.
No hay or mash but gourmet stash –
an appetite boutique.
June 10, 1900: A Concord police officer arrests clerk Walter Davis at Fitch’s Drug Store for selling soda water on Sunday. The law allows for Sunday sales of only “bread, milk and the other necessities of life.” A judge will let Davis off, saying that soda is as necessary to life as milk and that citizens should be encouraged to drink anything other than alcoholic beverages.
June 11, 2001: People passing by the federal courthouse in Concord share their reactions to the early morning execution of Timothy McVeigh. Their overwhelming sentiment: Good riddance.
June 11, 1837: Samuel Coffin Eastman is born in Concord. A great-grandson of Ebenezer Eastman, Concord’s first settler, he will become a prominent lawyer, bank president, railroad man, speaker of the New Hampshire House and school board member. In 1915, when Concord celebrates the 150th anniversary of its royal charter as a parish, he will be recognized as the city’s most prominent citizen and “president of the day.”
June 12, 2003: House and Senate negotiators reach a tentative agreement on a bill that would give the state exclusive authority to regulate guns. While supporters argue that without the bill, gun owners would face varying ordinances across the state, local officials counter that the bill will prohibit them from barring guns from town offices and other public buildings. Some say the bill puts town workers at risk of becoming victims of gun violence.
June 12, 2002: After three decades of teaching at Rumford School in Concord, teachers Curt Darling and Tom McKoan retire.
June 12, 1886: The Daniel Webster statue is dedicated in front of the State House.
June 12, 1977: In Concord, William Loeb tells the Gun Owners of New Hampshire that the only way to combat “anti-gun nuts” is “to go directly to the great mass of American people and educate them on the obvious necessity of citizens owning and having guns.”
June 12, 1804: Alarmed by the frequency of escapes from local prisons, Gov. John Gilman makes the first substantive proposal for a state prison in Concord. It will be more than eight years before the prison opens on North State and Tremont streets.
June 13, 2002: In a preliminary vote, the Concord city council unanimously approves the restoration of Fire Engine 1 to Concord’s Central Fire Station.
June 13, 1859: A huge fire on the southwest corner of Main and Pleasant streets in Concord consumes a bakery, several stores and the South Congregational Church. When it becomes certain that the fire will destroy the granite-and-wood Greek Revival church, the Rev. Henry Parker gives one final pull to the church bell rope, and the bell is heard above the crackle of flames.
June 13, 1920: James Cleveland is born. He will serve as Second District congressman from 1963 to 1981 after practicing law in Concord and New London and serving 12 years in the state Senate.
June 13, 1983: A 92-year-old covered truss bridge, fondly called Old Red by residents of Pembroke, collapses in a fierce storm. “It was bypassed by a modern bridge and wasn’t in use,” says Jim Garvin of the New Hampshire Historical Society. “But it was of interest to a few local people. It’s been sitting there like kind of a relic.”
June 13, 1957: President Dwight D. Eisenhower appoints James M. Langley, editor and publisher of the Concord Daily Monitor, to be U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. Langley will hold the job for just over two years.
June 14, 2003: Concord High School graduates 355 students.
June 14, 1944: Speaking on the causes of juvenile delinquency, Dr. Anna Philbrook, a psychiatrist at the State Hospital, says: “Children are growing up in homes where they have no facilities for play, where parents are so deeply concerned with earning enough money to buy the food needed by the family that they cannot spare the time to guide their children to healthful recreation.”
June 14, 1962: Astronaut Alan Shepard of Derry is in Concord for the unveiling of his portrait at the State House. After a week of speeches and banquets, he says, he is glad the picture shows him in a space suit so people will know that “at least once in a while I do work.”
June 15, 2002: Concord High School junior Rachel Umberger wins the national title for the 800 meters. She runs it in 2 minutes, 9.67 seconds, a personal best.
June 15, 2000: Concord Police Chief Bill Halacy submits his resignation, just two years after taking over the department. “The position is so totally consuming,” he says. “I’m feeling like I’m missing out on a lot of the rest of my life.”
June 15, 1987: Rep. Pat Schroeder of Colorado stops in Concord in search of support for a possible presidential run in 1988. “I think America is man enough to back a woman” – but not just because she is one, Schroeder says. She will later decide not to run.
June 15, 1776: Three men, including Concord’s Timothy Walker Jr., write a resolution instructing Dr. Josiah Bartlett and William Whipple, New Hampshire’s delegates in Philadelphia, to join “in declaring the 13 united colonies a free and independent state.” New Hampshire will support such a declaration “with our lives and fortunes,” the resolution says.
June 15, 1799: The Concord Musical Society is incorporated “to encourage and promote the practice of sacred music in Concord.”
June 16, 2000: James Hall, accused of killing his 77-year-old mother, testifies at his trial that the slaying was not planned. He says he strangled her after enduring weeks of insults until finally, “I felt as if I was collapsing inside, feeling this most intense pain. Pain I’d never felt in my life. I lunged out with my arm. I went into her neck and I pressed.”
June 16, 1842: The Democratic platform, as reported in Concord’s New Hampshire Patriot, rails against Whig support for broadening the rights granted to corporations. Only “an unwarranted construction of the Constitution” sanctions corporate privileges, the platform says. “If the policy of creating corporations be continued much longer, our country will (have) all the outward forms of a free Government, but . . . will in fact be governed by an oligarchy of corporations.”
June 16, 1864: Still short of the state’s recruiting quota for the Union Army, Gov. Joseph Gilmore announces a state bonus of $400 for any man who will sign up for the First New Hampshire Cavalry Regiment.
