B&A’s push to sea tied to County expansion

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Like Sherman’s march to the sea, the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad’s campaign to stretch its tracks to the ocean had a certain epic quality a century ago. The little landlocked railroad was determined to have its very own seaport as a sign of its energy and independence.

Back then industrial transportation in Maine was a delicate web of competing rail and ocean-going interests. For example, there were 41 railroads operating more than 2,000 miles of track in Maine. The B&A had made itself a major player in just a decade of operation.

Since its trains had started running, growth had been phenomenal, opening up large areas of northern woods towns to service. The next great step envisioned by the road’s president, Franklin W. Cram, was a track to Penobscot Bay in Waldo County, which would create a port for the company outside of the control of the Maine Central Railroad.

The proposed Northern Maine Seaport Railroad would begin with B&A track at LaGrange and run south 60 miles to Stockton Springs, Searsport and Belfast, where the Maine Central had a junction. Cram argued that the move would give a tremendous boost to development in Aroostook County, benefiting the railroad as well as the Bangor area.

The project would stimulate the expansion of potato acreage by hastening shipment to southern markets. It would encourage the creation of sawmills, allowing for the shipment of lumber directly from the St. John Valley, instead of having to float logs into Canada to be processed.

The B&A would save a huge amount on coal by having it shipped directly to its new port to be carried north in its own cars. Finally, the new port would eliminate the problem of the port at Bangor being iced in for five months of the year.

All in all, the new railroad would “Make a New Maine,” creating “the Golden Key to Unlock Vast Riches of Aroostook,” said a headline in the Bangor Daily News. It promised the railroad would be “the master stroke in the development of a new industrial and commercial empire.”

The chief obstacle – and it proved not to be a very big one – was approval by the state’s railroad commissioners. They met and voted unanimously in favor of the plan on Nov. 9, 1904.

Opponents failed to appear. “… those objecting to taking out of the charter object to its being known that they object, so I am informed….,” Cram wrote in a letter.

Speculation had surfaced early that the Boston and Maine Railroad would oppose the project, but railroad officials denied it was true.

At the hearing by the rail commissioners, Cram quashed another false rumor, denying that the Canadian Pacific Railroad had bought a controlling interest in the B&A to satisfy its desire to control a U.S. seaport.

Because the new railroad would bypass downtown Bangor, running through Hermon instead, some Bangoreans were apathetic or feared commerce at the port in Bangor would be harmed. In a newspaper interview in the NEWS on Nov. 11, George M. Houghton, general manager of the B&A, explained why they should support the enterprise: “The road will help Bangor. It will develop the country north of us, of which Bangor is the natural commercial center and base of supplies, and by doing that will bring more trade to the city.”

Proponents of the project, especially in Waldo County, were positively rhapsodic. Many people thought Stockton Springs would benefit the most. The local hotel had closed, according to the NEWS. The town had added the word “Springs” to its name a few years before “to boom some mineral springs,” but they had not operated for some time despite their “undoubted medicinal value.”

Mrs. Freeman Partridge, a town booster, wrote a poem expressing optimism about the coming of the railroad:

Men of business and of money

Listen to this glad refrain.

This is the land of ‘milk and honey,’

This booming town in eastern Maine,

Build your mills and factories on it,

On the shores of our fair bay,

Or you will repent, depend upon it,

At one distant future day.

When the Northern Maine Seaport Railroad opened in November 1905, the complex included wharves for lumber and freight on Cape Jellison in Stockton Springs. In Searsport, there was a steamship wharf for passengers and light freight on Kidder Point and a coal terminal, freight yard and engine house at Mack Point. The track was never extended to Belfast, according to Jerry Angier and Herb Cleaves in their history of the B&A.

One of the most interesting aspects of this Waldo County industrial revolution is that Cram, a summer resident of Searsport, also had recreational aspirations for his new empire, possibly including Sears Island, according to Joel Eastman, the island’s historian.

Early in 1905, the Bangor Investment Co., the B&A’s real estate arm, bought Sears Island. The next year, Cram and his associates began developing nearby Bar Point on the mainland into a recreational area named Penobscot Park. It included a large hotel, a dance pavilion and a baseball field. Crowds were brought there on special-excursion trains.

Eastman believes Cram may have planned to turn Sears Island into a summer resort, but that idea died along with Penobscot Park when it closed (for the second time) in 1927. The automobile had revolutionized travel, putting an end to many big resorts and amusement parks.

The B&A’s big splash by the ocean left its imprint on Searsport. Some of it is still visible today.

But in the latter part of the 20th century the focal point of discussion became Sears Island, reputedly the largest undeveloped or “unspoiled” island on the East Coast.

Since 1969, proposals to locate an aluminum smelter, an oil refinery, nuclear and coal-fired power plants, a container port and a liquefied natural gas terminal on the island have come and gone.

In 1998, the state completed purchasing the island for the public, although its future is still undetermined. Perhaps now it will become the kind of “summer resort” befitting such an ecological and historical gem in the 21st century.

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters 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.