Speech shows Bangor’s accomplishments

On a cold night in January a century ago, a large group of the richest, most influential men in Bangor gathered at City Hall to hear one of their brethren eulogize the year just ended and offer some tantalizing glimpses of what lay ahead.

It was one of the severest winters in years and thick ice was forming in the Penobscot River, one more sign of economic beneficence to this brotherhood of capitalists. A good ice harvest would be bringing more money to the area.

Living on the rim of economic prosperity in a place where the weather ruled events as much as common sense and hard work, it paid to have a positive attitude about such things. Edward Blanding’s economic almanac, soon to be delivered to these shrewd gentlemen of the Bangor Board of Trade, would offer more such encouraging indicators that the Queen City, despite its increasing remoteness in a nation moving ever west, was still at the center of the world when money was to be made.

Blanding was the board’s secretary and the editor of the Industrial Journal. The board represented a broad cross-section of the business community. Its president was a real estate broker and auctioneer. Other officers included the publishers of the city’s two daily newspapers and the president of a shoe factory, as well as a number of merchants who sold clothing, ice, coal, groceries, lumber and other products. The group was rounded out by a druggist and a portrait artist and picture framer.

Blanding opened his speech on the night of Jan. 11 with a predictable blandishment: “The year that has gone has had its clouds as well as its bright spots.” One of the clouds included the spring drought that had led to forest fires destroying large tracts of woodlands belonging to Bangor citizens. Another was the smallpox epidemic that fall that had threatened to disrupt business and harm the city’s reputation.

But putting those crises aside, Blanding began to describe a level of economic activity remarkable by today’s standards, even as the economy of eastern Maine was slowing down as assuredly as the ice in the river was cutting off the port of Bangor from ship traffic.

Exports from the Bangor Customs District had increased 25 percent. Products leaving the port of Bangor included fruit box shooks to the Mediterranean, spool bars to Scotland and deals to South America and the United Kingdom. One shipment of some unnamed product had even found its way to the Midway Islands “in the distant Pacific,” noted Blanding proudly.

The sawmills on the Penobscot had experienced an exceptionally busy season, and there had been a revival of the local ship-building industry, reported the secretary. In the fall, E. & I.K. Stetson had launched the four-masted schooner Horace A. Stone from their Brewer yard. Two more four-masters were under contract.

There were other major events to recount. A group of local businessmen had built a large factory in Brewer where “immense quantities of sheepskin will be tanned and finished into various kinds of plain and fancy leather.”

Strides had been made on the construction front as well. Forty new houses, a school at Union and First streets, a foundry on Franklin Street for the Penobscot Machinery Co., an “electric light structure” on York Street and a storehouse for water pipes for the city had all been built. Two other schools and two hotels either had been remodeled or expanded.

Further to the north, on the West Branch of the Penobscot River, an army of workers was busily finishing three dams that would help control the flow of water, lessening the impact of droughts that recently had slowed the log drives and the operations of Great Northern Paper Co. Despite such problems, the log harvest was expected to be “of great magnitude,” although not as voluminous as the 240 million feet the year before.

Blanding also outlined a cornucopia of plans, some visionary, enough to help the gentlemen of the board sleep better, even if at night they could hear the sound of the river ice grinding and growling in their dreams.

The Orrington Railroad and Peat Fuel Co. was planning to erect a briquette plant with 15,000 tons annual capacity at Hines Pond, after constructing a 7-mile electric railroad there from South Brewer.

The Maine Central Railroad was planning to build a modern passenger station at the foot of Exchange Street now that Bangor had “made great advancement as a railroad centre” by moving nearer the middle of the MCR system. This remarkable feat had been accomplished not by moving the city, but rather because the company had bought the Washington County Railroad, bringing the amount of MCR track east of Bangor to more than 300 miles.

Without being specific, Blanding also noted that the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad was doing a steadily expanding business, “entering the list of dividend payers” in 1903. He may have been aware that within a few weeks, the B&A would announce plans to open a line from LaGrange to Searsport, thus giving the railroad access to the sea.

Perhaps more exciting to the average worker in Greater Bangor was a plan devised by a group of Old Town and Bangor businessmen to build an electric railroad from Bangor through Hermon, Levant, Carmel, Corinth, Stetson, Exeter, and Garland all the way to Dexter. The work was supposed to begin in the spring, but it never came to pass.

Trolleys already ran through Bangor between Old Town and Hampden and out as far as Charleston. Two years later, the Eastern Traction Co. proposed a plan similar to that outlined by Blanding, but the Bangor Railway and Electric Co., which controlled the existing lines, quickly announced it was planning a competing line from Charleston to Dover. Neither project was ever built, according to Charles D. Heseltine, the historian of the Bangor Street Railway.

Near the end of his speech, Blanding issued a warning that, in lieu of future events, sends a shiver up one’s spine today. Wasn’t it time for the city to build a proper library building, he asked. The Bangor Public Library was then located in cramped quarters up over the Bangor Savings Bank by the Kenduskeag Stream at the beginning of State Street.

“In view, therefore, of the pressing needs of enlarged library accommodations and that furthermore Bangor’s splendid library is housed in a business block where a conflagration may any day wipe out valuable books that money could in no way replace, it is to be sincerely hoped that the trustees will arouse themselves to the importance of inaugurating at once a building campaign,” the secretary warned.

Seven years later, the library and its collection were obliterated in a fire that destroyed much of downtown Bangor, and officials belatedly heeded the advice out of necessity.

Richard R. Shaw contributed information to this column. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.