Project seeks to preserve Bangor’s past

Those who attempt a comprehensive exploration of Bangor’s history realize quickly that they’ve undertaken a formidable task.

The first thing they discover is that Bangor, despite its notable past, has no definitive history book to call its own. Except for the city’s prominent inclusion in “History of Penobscot County,” which chronicles the region’s first 100 years or so of development, Bangor’s historical record is largely a collection of bits and pieces of material that has been stored in several different locations over the decades.

Diligent researchers might begin by browsing the three illustrated histories of the city, whose photos and text serve more as a cursory introduction to Bangor’s past. They could then wander in Special Collections at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library and rummage through the dizzying wealth of printed material donated by James Vickery, a dedicated pack rat of a researcher who died five years ago without having written the one true Bangor history that he, more than anyone, was qualified to write. They could also sit for hours looking at the photographic treasury that Vickery passed on to the Bangor Public Library at his death.

Investigating Bangor’s past, in other words, has always been a time-consuming labor of love.

An ambitious new joint effort by the Bangor Public Library, Bangor Historical Society and the Maine Folklife Center of the University of Maine won’t necessarily fill the big void in Bangor’s history – the book that finally puts all the pieces together in one comprehensive and engaging story line. But in collecting and cataloging the photographic and documentary evidence of the ethnic minorities who helped build the city, organizers hope to make a lasting record of the distinctive contributions each group made to Bangor’s cultural heritage in the last century.

“Most of what we know of Bangor is through its Anglo-Saxon heritage, but there is also a significant ethnic mix that has made its mark here,” said Bill Cook, the local historian and special-collections librarian at the Bangor Public Library and one of the project’s coordinators. “There is the Jewish community, the Irish, African-Americans, Greeks, Scandinavians, Eastern Europeans, Asians, Italians. We want to gather and preserve the historical materials from each group before they are lost to us forever. The Greek merchants downtown, the Italians who first came here to work on the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad, the Polish families who ran the dairy farms. They’re a part of Bangor’s history that we don’t want to forget.”

The first phase of “The Many Faces of Bangor” project, Cook said, is to make the city’s ethnic communities aware of the historical value of the memorabilia stored in attics across the city – the photographs, family records, church and synagogue documents, store ledgers and other relevant items that tell Bangor’s history through the everyday lives of its residents. As the materials come in, he said, the library and historical society will become custodians of the photos, manuscripts and other family possessions handed down though the generations. The Folklife Center, he said, will assemble an oral history of Bangor’s diverse immigrant traditions through taped family interviews. Once the materials are gathered and archived, Cook said, the valuable educational resource will offer a glimpse into an important and colorful aspect of the city’s history that threatens to slip away with the passing of generations.

“The ethnic history of our city has never been adequately preserved,” said Norman Minsky, the Bangor lawyer and library board president who initiated the project. “We all know about the wealthy lumber barons, but not about the immigrant workers who made them rich and, in the process, went on to culturally and economically enrich the city as well. It’s a chapter of our history that has to be preserved now, before it’s gone forever.”