Bangor exhibit features vestiges of 1947 Mount Desert Island fires

BANGOR – The Maine Air Museum has created an exhibit designed to recall the 60th anniversary of fires that scorched parts of the state, particularly Mount Desert Island.

The exhibit highlights the role of aircraft in fighting the fires, which raged from mid-October to early November 1947.

“Bar Harbor has more notoriety because its big mansions burned,” said Bob Umberger, 61, of Biddeford, who put together the exhibit. He is a board member for the tiny museum, tucked on the edge of Bangor International Airport.

“The state was really ravaged by this. Sixty-five percent of Bar Harbor burned. There were towns in the southern part of the state where there wasn’t a single thing left in that town, but they were rural villages, sparsely populated compared to Bar Harbor,” Umberger said.

The exhibit includes a small, static display of firefighting gear typically used to combat the blazes, such as shovels, buckets and bandanas that firefighters used to breath through the heavy smoke. A poster collage board with copies of photographs and captions explaining each aircraft’s role in the firefight also is exhibited with the souvenirs.

The museum, on Maine Avenue, is a branch of the Maine Aviation Historical Society. “Our mission is to try to preserve as much aviation-related stories, artifacts and documentation as possible,” he said.

Umberger said the society began discussing in January how to recognize the anniversary of the 1947 fires, and he took the lead on the project.

“I started [by] sitting down and talking to my 86-year-old father, who was a professional forester for the state of Maine,” Umberger said. “He personally fought the 1947 fire.”

During the fires, two B-17s flew in from upstate New York to dump loads of dry ice into the clouds in hopes of creating rain.

Cargo planes such as the C-82 “Flying Box Car” landed at the Augusta State Airport with important fire suppression supplies, while C-47s landed in Augusta carrying batteries for firefighters.

Aircraft also played a big role in extensive media coverage: The New York Times and the Paris-based International Herald Tribune flew private planes over the burning state, Umberger said. Even the famous publisher Joseph Pulitzer II flew over his sister’s destroyed estate in Bar Harbor.