Crosscurrents of Change is scheduled to go to the printer on June 30, 2010, and should be available during the holiday season of 2010. This lavishly illustrated history of Concord in the 20^th century is alive with the striving and successes of average Concord residents in addition to the accomplishments of the capital city’s movers and shakers. The Concord Historical Society is already receiving text and photographs as the editing process begins.

• Meet Concord’s colorful citizens in the pages of Crosscurrents of Change:
  • Gus Lehtinen, who as Concord’s veteran planning director, worked with Concord Monitor editor James Langley to plan Concord’s growth and to create a thriving commercial city. It was Lehtinen who called the destruction of Concord’s beloved railroad depot, saying, “one of the greatest things that has happened to the city in several generations."
  • Jim Langley himself, who virtually created the Concord Planning Board and remained on that panel even after he moved to Bow. Langley was the last in a long line of editor/politicians who crusaded for the Republican Party at the same time he published scoops. Langley was a leader in assembling the land for Concord Hospital, one of the city’s economic jewels. Langley was at the center of an incident that led to the impeachment and removal of Mayor J. Herbert Quinn.
  • John Gilbert Winant, the governor who gave all the money in his pockets to Depression-Impoverished citizens as he walked into the State House. Winant, a former schoolmaster at St. Paul’s, was easily the state’s most beloved governor, while East Concord’s Styles Bridges became New Hampshire’s most powerful politician, keeping the secret of the atomic bomb.
  • Claude Dewey, 83, who trapped muskrats in the South End marsh and was part of a citizen movement that persuaded officials that natural, open space might be preferable to development.
  • Charles H. Willey, the sailor who became the only winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor to call Concord home.
• Crosscurrents of Change is truly a community project, as a score of writers with professional writing and historical credentials recall various aspects of Concord’s past. The Concord Historical Society is financing the project through private donations; government funds have not contributed to the writing of Crosscurrents of Change and the Society would welcome your participation.

All sorts of interesting people strut through the history of Concord in the 20^th century. Our record of that history, Crosscurrents of Change, is a community endeavor that tells the stories of average Concord residents at the same time it honors the contributions of Concord's leaders and prominent institutions. The last history of New Hampshire's capital was written early in the 1900s. The Concord Historical Society believes the tremendous changes that took place in the 20^th century must be preserved for educational, civic and historical use.

One of those preservationists is Stephen Winship, who has been a guide down the shallows and ripples as the Merrimack River flows.

Steve writes about a June day in the year 1929. He was 10 years of age, and he was going to the circus.

"I had arranged to walk with my mother across the long covered bridge, and we headed off to meet my grandparents at the circus box office. The vast Big Top and the surrounding tent village filled much of the grassy field beside the river.

"The walk from downtown would give me a chance to see my favorites, the trains. For the route was old Bridge Street (now Loudon Road), and a wooden covered bridge spanned Concord's busy railroad tracks before it crossed the Merrimack on a steel truss bridge. I prized the chance to look down on the steam locomotives as they charged under that overpass, bound for Sunapee, Manchester, Montreal and Boston. Marching off in my shorts and light shirt, I stood on the covered bridge and saw a southbound train was coming. I took up station to look down. Mother walked on.

"The locomotive chuffed under the bridge, under me. I was enveloped in hot gas from the smokestack - so hot I thought I had been roasted. Scared, coughing, I ran away. No permanent damage, although I was re-roasted by Mother's glare.

"Today that grassy field has sprouted a series of thriving shopping centers. The railroad is almost a memory; the sprawling rail yards are gone, and the rare train hauls coal to the power station in Bow. Today's engines are workhorses not iron horses, diesels as efficient as they are homely. Sometimes hopper cars, uncoupled and empty, sit on what once was the main line, the High Iron linking Montreal and Boston. That lonesome whistle blows in Concord just once or twice a year."

Catherine Cozzi lived most of her life in the green one and one-half story house in the middle of the block on Walker Street. This was Fosterville, once a thriving ethnic neighborhood north of Downtown that has almost been in forgotten. Louis Cozzi and his wife Philomene moved in to 26 Walker about 1900. Lous worked as a stone cutter for New England Granite Works on Rattlesnake Hill. And during the Roaring 20s, Louis moonlighted as a bootlegger.

When Catherine was 92, she told about bootlegging in Fosterville in an oral history interview with Geoffrey R. Kirsch, an intern for the Concord Historical Society in the summer of 2008.

"We made all our own stuff," Cozzi said. "Papa used to get around to the neighbors" and say, "I've got somebody coming next Friday. How many boxes of grapes do you want to make your wine?"

All those years she lived in Fosterville, Cozzi kept the press her father used to crush grapes down in the cellar during Prohibition, which made individual consumption of alcohol illegal in 1919. "They made the red," she said, "then with what was left, they squeezed the grapes a second time to make 'moonshine.' It was a white wine, a strong wine. And then, they'd squeeze it a third time and get grappa." Grappa is a traditional Italian distilled spirit, like brandy. All of it was buried in the sandy cellar of a neighbor's home.

The grapes would be trucked up from Boston. "We didn't get grapes every day of the week, just in the fall," Cozzi said. When Philomene closed black curtains over the windows, that was the signal. "You had to have your order and know what you were going to have, and you had to have your money," Cozzi said. "Usually Mama saved for it, and she collected" funds from neighbors who wanted to make their own wine.

Louis, she said, "also made the wine for the Catholic churches to use for the Communion wine."

These are among the stories that the Concord Historical Society began collecting in 2007. Concord's story is your story, and we hope you will help us tell the whole story. If you have a story to share, click on one of the buttons below.

Preliminary fundraising is under way, as the society hopes to raise $200,000 for the history.

- Editor John Milne
February 2009

Donate to the 20th Century History Campaign
Make a Suggestion To The Editor		Share a Concord Memory
Join The Society		Donate an Item

The City of Concord, in collaboration with the Concord Historical Society and the Penacook Historical Society, has begun a major initiative to record the city's 20th century history, to complement the earlier histories which stop at 1902. The first step in this process is to identify the various events and themes that have characterized the 20th Century. A few examples:

• Growth of State government, of the State judicial system and of Federal government facilities
  
• The Great Depression and economic recovery
  
• Two World Wars, and other foreign conflicts
  
• Expansion & decline of the city’s rail center; construction of an Interstate highway system.
  
• Closing of Rumford Press and Brezner Tannery.
  
• Two major floods, several devastating fires and a train wreck
  
• Re-use of the New Hampshire Hospital campus; development of a new Medical Center.
  
• Establishment of the New Hampshire Technical Institute
  
• Establishment of New Hampshire’s only law school
  
• Construction of new elementary schools, new neighborhoods and new riverfront parks
  
• Citizens who became professional athletes, Olympians, an astronaut and a composer
  

We have prepared a questionnaire for you to offer your personal insight into and knowledge of the past decades.

Questions We'd Like You To Answer:

What do you feel are significant events in Concord during the past century?

What person(s) of Concord do you feel should be covered in this history?

Do you have records or photos of these events and persons? May we contact you regarding these, and if so, how would you prefer we do this?

This form may be mailed to the Concord Historical Society, PO Box 1027, Concord, NH 03302-1027.