Wrapped in one of the coldest winters in memory, Bangor still had time for Broadway a century ago. And Broadway had time for the Queen City and other small towns when the New York crowds began to thin.

In between shoveling snow and chipping ice, hundreds of Bangoreans packed the Opera House on Feb. 14, 1905, to see the youthful, but already famous Ethel Barrymore, part of the acting dynasty sometimes referred to as “the royal family of the stage.”

Barrymore at age 26 had been acting for more than a decade and she had been a star for several years. This was not the first time she had paid her respects to Bangor.

As a young teenager, she was traveling with a company headed by her Uncle Sidney Drew and other relatives in the early 1890s. They needed to get from Bar Harbor to Bangor, where they were scheduled to perform for two nights.

“Uncle Googan [Drew] thought it would be nice to charter a little pleasure launch to go there. We were all delighted because we had heard that the fleet was in at Bangor and the house was completely sold out. We were looking forward to a theater full of uniforms and all the boxes filled with admirals and their ladies,” Barrymore wrote in her autobiography, which is short on precise dates.

“We started in beautiful weather, but we had not been out from shore for long before a dense fog settled upon us in a thick blanket and we suddenly realized that no one on board could tell exactly where we were going or where we were. It also developed that the captain of the launch had no charts and knew no more than we where we were going or where we were,” she wrote, kindly consigning the “captain” to anonymity.

With foghorns bellowing and bigger boats in the area, the terrified party anchored offshore for the night. Ethel and her cousin went fishing with string and baitless pins, providing the group with supper.

They arrived in Bangor the next day. To their chagrin, the house had been sold out the night before, but, not surprisingly, no one showed up for the second performance.

At the beginning of her career, Ethel sometimes was given minor parts and sometimes she had no part at all, as she traveled about with her relatives. She received no pay except the price of her food and hotel room.

By 1899, when she returned to Bangor a second time, with her famous Uncle John Drew’s company, her name was on the Opera House program, and her acting was noticed by a newspaper reviewer for the Whig & Courier.

“Miss Ethel Barrymore was very pleasing as ‘Beatrice Ebernoe,’ and made much with the role,” he noted briefly in a piece that Bangor historian Dick Shaw told me about.

By the time Barrymore reappeared here in 1905, she was famous, thanks to her Broadway performance four years earlier in “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines.” The Bangor newspapers ran her photograph and gushed over the current play, called “Sunday,” after its lead character’s name, and its performers, who were the original Broadway cast.

“Miss Ethel Barrymore has made the hit of her career in Sunday, her new play. The present will undoubtedly go into theatrical history as the most successful season Miss Barrymore has ever had. Her personal popularity is scarcely equaled by another actress on the American stage,” said one of the newspaper promos, which were little different than advertisements.

The actual reviews of the play, however, were less than glowing, although Barrymore and her cast held up under the scrutiny of the Queen City’s occasionally caustic theater critics.

The play was nothing but a “glorified melodrama,” sniffed the Bangor Daily News’ writer.

His praise of Barrymore was glowing, but included a little dig: “Miss Barrymore’s voice, like olives, is an acquired taste – and the writer has never cared for olives,” he complained. “But few will dispute the power of her beauty, the magnetism of her personality, the perfection of her art, and the womanly charm, tempered by a sort of girlish ingenuousness, which glows throughout her work.”

The Bangor Daily Commercial’s man was more accommodating, both to the play and to Barrymore’s voice. While the play would “probably not go down in history as a masterpiece of dramatic writing,” it nevertheless was delightful.

As for Barrymore, she was a charmer, and she “will always be welcome in Bangor,” he surmised. In fact, she returned to Bangor at least one more time, in 1907, to reprise her role in “Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines.”

She and other members of her illustrious family, whose acting spans three centuries, were probably here other times as well. As late as 1984, Ethel’s grand-niece, Drew Barrymore, made an appearance in Bangor in connection with the Stephen King movie “Firestarter,” in which she appeared.

The ticket prices were high on that cold February night a century ago, but the theater was almost filled by an enormous crowd, both newspaper critics agreed. This was all in keeping with the Queen City’s image of itself as a cultural center. Ethel Barrymore was part of a steady stream of accomplished stage performers, actors and musicians, who came to Bangor, often on their way between Portland and Saint John, New Brunswick.

The critic for the NEWS concluded his review with a pat on the back for his readers: “The audience, filling every available seat at prices supposed to be permissible only to a grand opera star, again went to prove the long established truth that as a ‘show town’ Bangor has no equals among the smaller cities of the New England States.”

This would all change in a few years with the growing popularity of movies, radio and television. Broadway would stay on Broadway, venturing perhaps as far as Boston. By then, one could see Ethel Barrymore on the silver screen.

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