On Thursday, the Legislature took another step toward opening the State House to the public on Saturdays between Memorial Day and Columbus Day. The change will be a boost for Concord and a gift to the many out-of-state visitors who can stop and photograph the historic 1819 building – the only State House in the nation in which lawmakers still meet in their original chambers – but can’t enter it.
Under the proposed arrangement, the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce will cover the first year’s estimated $25,000 cost of staffing the building and leading tours. That will buy time for long-term arrangements to be made.
We hope that Concord will build upon the success of Main Street’s redevelopment and the State House opening by doing more to showcase not only Concord but the state as a whole.
Last year, the Concord High School History Club and the Pierce Brigade led a costumed re-enactor tour of the Old North Cemetery, a National Historic Register site just blocks from the State House.
Those groups, perhaps joined by Concord Community Players and volunteers, should make the tour a regular event. It would give visitors one more thing to do – all the better to walk around, get hungry and dine, shop and lodge locally – and bring in a little money that could be used to support the organizations and contribute to the upkeep of the cemetery.
There are amazing stories to be told out of the 1730 cemetery.
Franklin Pierce, the nation’s 14th president, is buried there, but he’s only a start. The graveyard is the final resting place of veterans of most of the nation’s early wars, from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond.
Noted abolitionist and newspaper editor Nathaniel Peabody Rogers is buried there. On his gravestone is engraved “Friend of the Slave.” There too, buried as a pauper, is Phillip Carrigain, a Dartmouth trained lawyer, secretary of state, namer of several peaks in the White Mountains, creator of the most accurate and beautiful maps of the state, and man who, on greeting the Marquis de Lafayette on his visit to Concord, dubbed New Hampshire “The Granite State.”
Countess Sarah Rumford, daughter of Concord resident Benjamin Thompson, has a marker at the cemetery. Her father, known as Count Rumford, was a famous scientist, social engineer and traitor in the Revolutionary War.
Rumford was found not guilty of aiding the British for lack of evidence but fled Concord when he heard the news that a mob planned to tar and feather him. He achieved great success abroad, took as his last name the city’s original name, Rumford, and, though offered the opportunity, never returned.
The cemetery is also the location of the imposing granite Stickney mausoleum. As a young Concord native, Joseph Stickney made a fortune in Pennsylvania coal and railroads and went on to build the Mount Washington Hotel, the last and grandest of its era. His young widow, Carolyn, remarried wealthy Parisian Aymon de Faucigny Lucinge and, for her philanthropic work in World War I, was named a countess.
Lucinge loved the hotel, spent every summer there, and her ghost is said to haunt it. She was initially buried, according to the New York Times under the headline “Funeral for a Princess,” in Blossom Hill Cemetery but was reinterred in Old North in 1936 when her husband’s mausoleum was finally complete.
Concord has a rich and wonderful history. It should be shown off.