The Fourth of July got off to an early start in Bangor a century ago with a fire in Estabrooke’s cigar store in the Old Jones Block on Hammond Street. It spread into the basement bulging with rockets, Roman candles, firecrackers, pinwheels “and every other device that has been invented to help the youth of the country remember their heritage,” reported the Bangor Daily News on June 30, 1905.

Within 10 minutes of the alarm being pulled, the celebration began. “Rockets roared and swished and thrashed in the narrow confines of the basement. Firecrackers sputtered and Roman candles went off in spasmodic puffs. The firemen beat a hasty retreat until the observance should have been completed,” wrote the reporter, who had most likely run up to the scene from his office on Exchange Street.

That was just the beginning of what we call euphemistically “an old-fashioned Fourth,” back when small bombs and other celebratory weapons were still legal. Miraculously, nobody was killed or dismembered that year, at least in the Bangor area.

Officialdom did what it could to channel the annual hooliganism into something constructive. There were plenty of down-home style public events to attend, a lot more than there are today in this era of the automobile, television and the back-yard barbecue.

You could go to the circus in Calais or board the double-turreted monitor US Puritan, anchored off Eastport.

You could hear the Declaration of Independence being read at the Waterville fairgrounds or watch the naphtha boat race on Sebasticook Lake, the winner powered by a 4-horsepower engine.

You could watch Joseph LaRoux, the famous aeronaut, parachute to earth after being shot out of a cannon suspended from a balloon at the $2,000 Celebration in Bar Harbor. You could run in The Fat Men’s Race at Utopia Park in Warren.

Or you could attend Culbert’s Wild West Sham Battle featuring the Hamlin Rifles as the Indians and the High School Cadets as the U.S. Army at Maplewood Park, now Bass Park, in Bangor.

You could attend baseball games, run three-legged races and hear band concerts just about anywhere. Thousands of people attended these events.

But to see the real Fourth, the one performed by the street urchins of Bangor and other towns, you had to go downtown, where mischief ruled and it sounded like the Battle of Port Arthur as those people who had been following the Russo-Japanese War in the newspapers liked to say.

Those with the wherewithal fled to their camps on Hermon Pond, Green Lake and a host of similar places, or they took the B&A excursion train to Moosehead Lake or the excursion steamer Verona to Rockland where a squadron of warships was in the harbor, or they took the trolley to Riverside Park in Hampden where the entertainment lasted long after dark.

The celebration began in Bangor about 6 p.m. on the night before the Fourth on Main and Exchange streets and especially in West Market Square. “Pandemonium was let loose in a blaze of red fire and patriotic joy,” wrote the BDN reporter, summoning as much purple prose to match the event as possible. “The police did not interfere, although, according to law, no firearms could be properly discharged till midnight – it would have taken the entire force anyhow to cope with the spirit of frenzied enthusiasm which animated younger Bangor.”

With dynamite caps blasting and blank cartridge revolvers firing and cannon crackers exploding, things started to heat up as the night went on. “By ten o’clock, save for the street car lines, all ordinary traffic was suspended and the entire business section of the city was given over to deliriously excited boys.”

Two days later, the newspaper assured its readers that there had not been a single serious accident. But people had a high tolerance for violent injuries back then. In fact, former state Rep. Frank Tupper had received serious powder burns when a firecracker blew up near his face, and newspaper carrier Jerry Sprague was hurt when he fired a blank pistol into his face. “He will be disfigured, but the wound is not dangerous,” the newspaper reassured readers.

Then there was the unidentified Bangor woman who fired a blank pistol at her husband on the morning of the Fourth to wake him up. “The doctor stated it would take an hour a day for a week to pick the powder grains out,” the paper recorded.

Nineteen men were locked up for drunkenness at the Bangor police station. At a large event in Newport sponsored by the fire department, 18 firemen were deputized after a rumor spread that “evil-minded men of Bangor” were coming with bags stuffed with liquor bottles “to corrupt the morals and inflame the brains of our sober country youth.” These mysterious men thought better of their plot and no one was arrested.

But things did get out of hand in Aroostook County.

In Houlton, rioting men broke a plate-glass store window, tore down signs and tried to set a fire in Market Square. “I have lived in this town all my life. I have been on the police force a number of years but the crowd about the streets last night was the toughest and the hardest to control that I have ever seen,” said Officer Monson.

And blood flowed freely on a B&A train on July 5 when a group of a dozen Millinocket men returning from a celebration in Fort Fairfield discovered their round-trip tickets had run out the day before. The dispute was quelled in Bridgewater where one of the men was arrested and the others jumped out of the train windows and fled.

At the station in Bangor, the blood on Conductor Gillin’s normally immaculate uniform was evident and more was seen on the floor of a car where windows had been broken.

“Smash-up?” asked a station lounger.

“‘Nother Aroostook War?” suggested a second.

“Neither,” replied Mr. Gillin decisively. “It was a scrap.”

Thus ended another old-fashioned Fourth.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.