To someone driving through downtown today, 90 years after the Great Bangor Fire of 1911 claimed two lives and $3 million in property, the scars of that terrible day are no longer visible. But the tangible reminders of the inferno’s transforming power are everywhere to be seen.

There are the spacious Kenduskeag and Norumbega malls, along with Abbott Square, designed as fire breaks in the post-1911 paranoia.

Many 19th century buildings were gutted by the fire, so half of downtown – all of Franklin Street, most of Exchange and Central streets – is lined with 20th century brick blocks that rose like the phoenix after the April 30 disaster.

Harlow Street was transformed from an elm-lined neighborhood of brick and wooden residences, businesses and the high school, to the more urban, commercial thoroughfare of today.

An ordinance enacted immediately after the fire banned future construction of permanent wooden structures; none exists today .

Two thousand trees are reputed to have been destroyed in the Bangor fire, along with untold dogs, cats and other pets trapped by the holocaust.

“BANGOR SWEPT BY FURIOUS FIRE,” trumpeted the Bangor Daily News’ banner headline on Monday morning, May 1. A secondary headline related the awful truth of the most devastating nine hours in the city’s history:

“Postoffice, Library, Seven Churches and Scores of Business Buildings Gone – Insurance 60 Per Cent – Awful Spectacle Witnessed by Big Crowds – Drouth and Wind Hasten Havoc.”

The paper also reported the original estimate of $7 million to $10 million in property damage; the figure was later downsized to $3,168,080.90. Many property owners reportedly discussed reconstruction plans for their businesses and homes while the fire, which burned brightly enough to read a newspaper by after the electricity failed, still raged.

How the fire started will never be known, but where it began is not in dispute.

Around 4 p.m., a blaze, possibly started by men seen smoking in the area, engulfed J. Frank Green’s shed on Pickering Square, in the vicinity of the present-day parking garage. Hay, tar paper and other materials burned quickly, and the fire was fanned by a stiff southerly wind.

The breeze swept embers across the Kenduskeag Stream, catching many Sunday strollers that warm afternoon by surprise.

“It seemed as though a hundred small fires had started at once,” reported M.J. Callinan in a souvenir booklet sold on the streets not long after the disaster. “The Universalist church facing Centre Park, the Library building on State street and the new Stearn’s building on Exchange street were wrapped in a sheet of flame almost in a moment.”

Callinan continued, “The heroic efforts of the firemen to check the onward march of the flames was [sic] fruitless and even the most optimistic of the spectators predicted the total destruction of the part of Bangor lying east of the Kenduskeag Stream.”

The fire raged into the night and was visible as far away as Brunswick, 100 miles to the south. Finally, it was stopped by a long brick fire wall stretching between Franklin and Central streets, sparing the City Hall on Hammond Street and all of the landmarks on West Market Square and Main Street.

If not for that wall, and the heroism of firefighters and common citizens armed with garden hoses and other apparatus, today’s downtown would be exclusively 20th century, with none of the earlier treasures of the 1800s that charm visitors on the west side of the stream.

The 1911 inferno brought out the best, and occasionally the worst, in human nature. Somehow only the poignant stories, some apocryphal, as in any disaster, have survived.

There is the canard about the woman living on Broadway, where many fine homes were leveled, who had neighbors move her belongings onto the grassy mall, only to watch the fire claim the furniture and spare her house.

Frank C. Hinckley found himself trapped in the steeple of St. John’s Episcopal Church on French Street. Like a stunt man in the movies, he slid down the bell rope to safety.

Perhaps the most verifiable story of one man’s fortitude, and no doubt the most publicized in the press, concerned Mayor Charles W. Mullen, who jumped into his car and drove to Northern Maine Junction in Hermon, where he telegraphed fire companies in Waterville, Lewiston, Waterville and Augusta.

Mullen also made news by refusing all outside financial assistance, exemplifying a pride and optimism that infuses local government to this day. The mayor even turned down the generosity of Boston Mayor “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the grandfather of John F. Kennedy.

“We thank you for your offer of assistance but believe we will be able to take care of our people in need without outside help,” he wrote.

Looting was more prevalent than many historians would have readers believe. It might have been more of a problem had Police Chief Frank H. Davis not laid down the law and called in Company G, 2nd Regiment of the Maine National Guard, which mustered at City Hall. One story claims Davis ordered the men to shoot to kill if looting was discovered, knowing their guns weren’t loaded.

In the days following the fire, hordes of sightseers streamed into Bangor, along with reporters and photographers. Because of the advances in photography by 1911, hundreds of postcards, panoramic photographs and snapshots were taken; some still turn up in antique shops for sale to collectors.

A precious few pictures, such as the one showing the nighttime burning of the First Parish steeple at State Street and Broadway, show the fire actually in progress. The rest display a rubble-strewn city that resembles Dresden or Berlin during World War II.

Women in plumed hats and parasols seem out of place as they stroll among the wreckage. Another shows a man armed with a rifle guarding the safe of the Bangor Savings Bank, destroyed in the fire. Also lost in upstairs rooms were the collections of the public library and historical society.

In 1984 a six-block area of downtown was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, giving special status to business blocks having the distinction of being located in a truly historic part of Bangor.

No one living today was an adult on April 30, 1911, so insight into a horrific day in Maine history can only come from newspaper accounts and other sources.

Local newspapers quoted Mayor Mullen as predicting, correctly, “Bangor is undaunted. Bangor will come back.”

The Bangor Daily News, in the same indomitable spirit, editorialized on May 3, 1911, “Many fires cannot consume, many waters cannot drown, many croakers cannot discourage, many cruel blows cannot kill Bangor, which remains the Queen City of the East, which will spread and prosper and make glad the Eastern world, when envious backbiters and pessimists and harbingers of woe shall have retreated to their mountain caves, and their memorials shall be leveled to the earth.”