Freese’s ‘golden age’ began a century ago

Department stores were magical places a century ago. Bangoreans, like other Americans, admired the big plate glass windows, the electric lights and elevators, the well starched clerks, the ready-to-wear clothes and other modern amenities.

Several of these palaces of mass consumption were located in the Queen City. J. Waterman Co., J.C. White & Co., and Benson & Miller were among them. Chain stores had arrived as well, including Besse-Fox Co. and C.S. Woolworth & Co. But it took one man named A. Langdon Freese to show eastern Maine how big and important a department store could be.

In 1892, at age 23, Freese opened a little store in rented quarters at what became 80 Main St., “about where the ladies hosiery counter of Freese’s Inc. now stands,” said his obituary 60 years later. It occupied the space of “half a store,” about 20 by 60 feet, with only one window. Within a year, he had doubled the size, and that was just the beginning.

By 1906, Freese was considered “a rising young merchant, the proprietor of one of the most prosperous and popular dry goods houses in the state,” declared the Bangor Daily Commercial on July 3 after the young entrepreneur bought property next door for a major expansion of his business. “Freese’s is a household word over a large part of eastern Maine and the store is one of the best known in the city.”

His department store had become so busy that Freese had purchased the remaining half of the block of stores at 74-78 Main St. Freese had bought the first half on March 1, said the newspaper.

Renovations would begin, including the removal of partitions, the addition of a fourth story on part of the store and an extended back, installation of an electric elevator, steel ceilings, modern lighting and other amenities that would attract even more shoppers.

The grand opening of the expanded store was on May 18, 1907. Freese’s now stretched from 74 to 86 Main St., where the Maine Discovery Museum is today. The street floor encompassed what had formerly been five different stores.

“We keep almost everything,” Freese promised in a newspaper advertisement announcing the gala event. The store featured a grand variety of “the newest styles in millinery, flowers, waists, etc.” It stocked ready-to-wear clothes for those with some extra money, as well as material for families that made their own. (In 1907, there were also about 45 dressmakers and a dozen tailors operating in Bangor, according to the city directory.)

The grand opening was a classy affair. Hall’s Orchestra played band music. A Sousa march, a waltz by Victor Herbert and other popular tunes entertained the admiring crowds. “It’s certainly the golden age for Freese’s,” declared the Bangor Daily News.

A larger advertisement two days later waxed poetic: “The lightest, brightest cheeriest salesrooms in Maine. A flood of light. A garden of white. An inspiring sight. Looks like a beautiful scene when you first get a glimpse of it.”

All sorts of exotic products were available, including new china silk waists, black taffeta jumpers, white dotted Swiss muslin, Marseilles white soap, dimity and batiste, Japanese crepe kimonos and “the greatest ribbon bargain you ever had in Bangor.” Imagine the reactions of the wives of farmers and mechanics, and the clerks and typewriters who paraded up and down the aisles like tourists at a fair.

Getting women to overcome their fears of riding elevators was a challenge, however. “We ask as a special favor of ladies who dislike to ride in an elevator to try ours. The smoothest running elevator we have ever seen; no jerks, no dropping sensation coming down.”

The millinery department had its own grand opening on the third floor a few days later. Around this time, the store had a head milliner and from 12 to 15 assistants who sat at counters all day long making hats. F. Drummond Freese, the son of A. Langdon, recalled many years later that they made 3,000 hats a week, and the store would have to sell 1,000 because fashions changed rapidly. This was back when women wore large hats artfully decorated with flowers, feathers and ribbons.

As the years went by, the automobile and better roads helped expand the store’s marketing region dramatically. In the beginning, the store had a marketing region of about a dozen miles radius. The automobile made it possible for people to come from Greenville or Houlton for the day and go shopping and take in a show.

Over the next few decades, a bewildering succession of expansions and improvements followed those of 1906 and 1907 until the store covered four blocks and consisted of 140,000 square feet, with six stories on Main Street and seven on Pickering Square employing hundreds of people.

It became the biggest department store in northern and eastern Maine, if not east of Boston, as some claimed.

Today, most of Bangor’s early department stores have been forgotten in the wake of the national chains and the shopping malls that finally rearranged the city. But 22 years after closing on Main Street, Freese’s is still a legend.

The old Bangor newspapers captured the spirit over the years. They called Freese’s an “industrial colossus” and a “commercial miracle” – even “Fifth Avenue in Maine.” By 1957, the expression “Meet me at Freese’s” had become as common a saying in Bangor as “Meet me under the clock in the Biltmore” was in New York, claimed a Bangor Daily News reporter in 1957. What Bangor stores will still be legends a century from now?

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net. Dick Shaw contributed information for this column.