Maine’s history up in smoke Fires wrought havoc statewide in 1900s

Fire! The cry still strikes terror. And despite the existence of modern safety codes and fireproof building materials, lives are lost and millions of dollars in property destroyed each year.

But turn back the clock a century if you want to know the true magnitude of the damage fires could cause. Hardly a town had not seen its business district destroyed a time or two, and hardly a person did not have a neighbor who had been left homeless in a blaze.

There had been nothing in Maine, however, like what happened at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago. People read their newspapers in horror.

On New Year’s Eve, 1903, the papers were full of accounts of the Iroquois Theater disaster, the worst fire in Chicago history (not to be confused with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, in which at least 300 people were killed). At least 600 people died, some “roasted” in their seats, according to a Bangor newspaper.

Mainers, already cognizant of the terrible toll fires could take on their downtowns and in their forests, the heart of their economy, suddenly became even more interested in the menace.

Safety inspectors in the state’s major communities began making the rounds of theaters and other public gathering places, looking for violations. The reason the death toll was so high at the Iroquois was that safety rules, which could have prevented the inferno from jumping from the scenery onstage into the audience, had been ignored.

A little over a week after the Chicago fire, Maine’s insurance commissioner, S.W. Carr, issued a bulletin stating that the first week in January had been a record-breaker for fire loss in the Pine Tree State. The list of fires reported in the Bangor Daily News was astounding by today’s standards. They included:

Jan. 2: Two houses and a stable in Biddeford and a sardine cannery in Cutler.

Jan. 3: The Portland Beef Co., the Grant Hotel in Rockland, two millinery stores in Bangor and a blacksmith shop in Caribou.

Jan. 5: A toothpick mill in Dixfield, the Tontine Hotel in Brunswick, a clothing store in Fairfield and a dormitory at Farmington Normal School.

Jan. 6: A house in Skowhegan.

Jan. 7: Two business blocks in Augusta and a store in Montague, now known as West Enfield.

The week’s death toll: four.

Not on the list was a devastating fire in Abbot that had occurred four days before Christmas. It illustrated how a conflagration could literally change a town’s history.

“The fire in Abbot village Monday afternoon … destroyed every industry in the place,” concluded a Bangor Daily News story a couple of days later. Lost were a woolen mill employing 30 people, a sawmill, a gristmill, a woodworking mill and a machine and blacksmith shop. The covered bridge across the south branch of the Piscataquis River also burned,

cutting off telephone communication with the outside world.

The whole town turned out to fight the inferno. The woolen mill’s hydrants could not be used because the pump room had already been engulfed in flames, so the people formed a bucket brigade – but to little avail. A telegram was sent to Guilford asking for help and a large group responded, saving some houses.

After that fire and another one in 1917, “no large-scale industry ever again claimed Abbot for its home,” according to the town’s sesquicentennial history. The community’s population of 716 went into a steep decline and never regained the numbers it had in 1900. The town had ceased to be an economic engine, evolving instead into a bedroom community for commuters and vacation-home owners.

Although eastern Maine had no tragedy like the Iroquois Theater fire, it had plenty of big fires that wreaked havoc on its already declining rural economy. Of course, the area’s biggest disaster, the great Bangor conflagration of 1911, was still a few years away.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era papers including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.