Advent of electricity diminished fires

Coney Island, move over. Ditto for “the famous white streak along Broadway,” better known as The Great White Way a few decades later.

That was the message Bangor sent to the world during the Christmas season a century ago with all the new electric signs going up on stores and other businesses along Main Street.

“Maine Street A Blaze of Light; Electric Lights By the Thousand Dazzle Christmas Shoppers After Dark,” the headline said in the Bangor Daily News on Dec. 19, 1904.

“It was a blaze of light from Pol’s corner [Hammond and Main streets] up to the Tarratine Club and it is only a question of time before other firms will fall into line and we will have a ‘white streak’ of our own,” said the paper.

Think how dark and dreary the streets must have been at night before the advent of those electric signs, especially in the winter when many people depend on lights, including the commercial kind, to brighten up their lives.

And plenty of people still had no electricity in their homes. The Public Works Co. had been giving away lottery tickets on the trolleys the week before Christmas. The top 13 winners were given from $20 to $73 toward having their houses wired.

For those who already had electricity, the company was selling “electrical decorative outfits” – strings of lights – for Christmas trees. Besides selling more electricity, the goal was to get people to stop using candles, a major safety hazard.

“An important advantage of the electrically lighted tree is that it may be kept lighted as long as is desired, and the pleasure which its illumination imparts prolonged far beyond the useful life of wax candles,” opined the NEWS in an editorial. It suggested the Fire department should ban the use of candles on trees at public events.

Fire was everybody’s great horror. A particularly tragic one that year in the season of the Christ child gave Bangor its own child upon whom to shower gifts.

John Johnson, a “big, sturdy and hardworking” Swedish immigrant, had made enough money to get a mortgage on a house on Boylston Street in Stillwater Park. He and his wife and three sons lived there. “His pride was his home and family,” reported the Bangor Daily Commercial.

On the morning of Dec. 21, Johnson had gone to his job as a coal shoveler at Hincks Coal Co., and his wife had stepped out for a moment at about 8 a.m. to a neighborhood store to buy some crackers for breakfast.

Upon her return, she saw the house was in flames. Rushing inside to save her sons, in “another example of the greatness of a mother’s love,” she died along with Kenneth, 7, and Theron, 3. Only Herbert, 9, was able to escape, jumping through a second story window and suffering numerous cuts and serious burns.

Little Herbert, as his name was inevitably prefaced in later stories, lay swathed in bandages on a cot awaiting Christmas at the Eastern Maine General Hospital. “He wonders what Santa Claus is going to bring him,” reported the Commercial a couple of days later. “The hospital authorities hope that he will be remembered by the generous public.”

The day after Christmas, the paper informed people that “Little Johnson” was happy. “The stocking that the nurses hung beside the little fellow’s cot was not large enough to contain one-tenth of the gifts sent to the lad.”

Little Herbert put a face on Christmas for many people that year. The papers also contained stories of big, anonymous affairs for children provided by Bangor’s largesse, such as a Christmas gala for 300 children at City Hall put on by the Women’s Crusade and a similar affair for the orphans at the Children’s Home. Other publicly supported celebrations were documented at the Eastern Maine Insane Hospital and the Poor Farm as well as at Eastern Maine General Hospital.

“Did you ever think how little it takes to make a child happy, whether rich or poor, especially when the gift is unexpected or a surprise?” asked a NEWS editorial writer in the paper’s annual “season’s homily.”

Serious fires continued to plague the area, although they were less tragic. The temperature dropped to nearly 30 below zero on Christmas Eve and did not go up much the next day. People cranked up their furnaces and stoves.

In East Hampden, a mile below the Tin Bridge, the Welch house “burned flat.” The fire department turned out but there was no water close enough to the house to fight the blaze, said a report in the Commercial

At Maplewood Park, known today as Bass Park, a serious fire destroyed Ralph Burrill’s training stable, killing a valuable racehorse named Percy Wilkes, owned by H.N. Pierce of Lincoln, three “imported boars” and two dogs.

The celebrity fire of the season though was at the home of Franklin W. Cram, president of the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad, on State Street and Broadway. It was just a chimney fire, but firefighters had to return when it reignited.

The first visit brought forth a box of cigars from the beneficent Mr. Cram. On the second visit, the seven men were served “a substantial lunch” and each was given “a bright $5 gold piece,” the equivalent of about $100 today.

As time went on, the tragic fires would be fewer and fewer as more safety measures were adopted. And the commercial lighting would increase until it gradually blotted out the stars over Bangor that could still be seen twinkling a century ago.

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.