Will the real Mr. French please rise?

As they have for nearly 100 years, the brightest senior students at Bangor High School walked proudly to the stage during the recent commencement exercises to receive their coveted Charles E. French medals.

Since its inception in the early 1900s, the award has endured as a symbol of pride in scholarship, a commitment to academic excellence, and the refusal to accept mediocrity. Yet the medal, awarded to the four top cumulative-grade earners of the class, has always come with one intriguing question attached.

Who the heck is Charles E. French?

The last time I posed that question, in a story 13 years ago, high school principals past and present merely scratched their heads and chuckled over the long-running mystery.

“I find it kind of amusing, I really do,” said Norris Nickerson, who has been the Bangor High principal since 1990. “The medal is in honor of someone, but we don’t know who. It just goes on.”

John Fahey, the principal for 17 years before that, told me that he, like Nickerson, had scoured old yearbooks and school records for any information about French, but came up empty. Fahey said that when he learned he would be awarding the French medal in 1973, he thought it was to honor foreign language students. The original medal, nearly 8 ounces of solid silver nestled in a velvet-lined case, has been reduced over the decades to a postage-stamp-sized medal hanging on a ribbon.

“Thank God no recipient ever asked me [about the medal’s namesake], because I would not have been able to tell him a thing,” Fahey admitted at the time.

Because the Bangor Public Library had no record of the man, I turned to Bangor’s foremost authority on local history. If anyone had a clue to the man’s identity, it would be James Vickery.

“I don’t know any Charles E. French at all,” said Vickery, who died in 1997.

After all these years, Debe Averill thinks she may be hot on the trail of the elusive Mr. French. The Bangor High librarian began her research about two months ago, when the public library called to say someone had been in to ask the question that’s been floating around the city for generations: Who the heck is Charles E. French? Averill read through several Bangor histories, but none mentioned French. Undaunted and Internet savvy, she eventually managed to track down several men named Charles E. French who lived in the Boston area sometime in the mid-1800s.

“Of all those Frenches,” she said, “there was only one who would have had the financial means to leave a $5,000 gift to his old high school in his name. The others were laborers and seamen and such.”

Further investigation revealed that the wealthiest Charles E. French of the group was a commission merchant who lived on Indian Wharf in Boston and worked in the bustling shipping trade on the waterfront. Records indicate that French, who was born in Bangor and died in 1907, graduated from high school sometime in the 1850s, during the city’s commercial heyday. Averill has a snippet of French’s will, in which he speaks of the bequest to Bangor High, “where I went to school,” and she plans to obtain the entire document. Averill also intends to search further at the Mormon library, the world’s largest genealogical database, when she takes her debate and speech team to the National Forensic League Tournament in Salt Lake City this weekend.

“It may take a while, but we are finally going to know who Charles E. French was,” Averill said.