A century ago, river ice shut down trolleys

Fire and ice fought for control of the Penobscot River at Bangor a century ago. The result was a draw with both sides conceding a bit.

THE RIVER CLOSING, announced a Bangor Daily Commercial headline on Dec. 2, 1907. “Ice Is Forming Fast Along the Shores and In Docks.” Men were betting on the date when vessels would no longer be able to sail into Bangor harbor.

The reporter walked down to the shore to view conditions: “The river was full of floating ice and frozen slush … from Winterport up the ice is forming its fetters on the grand old river, filling the coves and narrowing the stretches of open water every day.” He was banking on an early freeze – some time before Dec. 13, the average date. He was going to get a big surprise.

The next day floating ice began to cause trouble although the harbor remained navigable. The dozens of people who walked down to the ferry slips to take the Bon Ton over to their jobs in Bangor or Brewer each morning found the little boat had disappeared along with the slips. Heavy ice had formed around them in the night, and the tide had carried them away. Within hours of being located up against a downriver wharf, the Bon Ton was back on the job.

With the first hints of ice, the last of the schooners rushed to clear port to avoid being trapped. The last vessel out was the C.B. Clark with a shipment of lumber loaded at the Eastern Manufacturing Co., according to the Bangor Daily News on Dec. 16. It was still possible to come up the river if you had “urgent business and some good ice-sheathing,” but no more traffic was expected.

The harbor remained navigable, but ice further up the river was causing more problems for the Queen City. The targets were the hydroelectric plants at the Bangor dam, which powered the city’s streetlights and public buildings, and at the Veazie dam, which powered the Bangor Railway & Electric Co. trolleys as well as private customers including factories, stores and a small minority of households.

Submerged “anchor ice,” which formed in large slushy masses that could clog hydroelectric plant intake pipes, was to blame. “This ice gets into the racks protecting the gates and gets through into the wheel pits stopping the wheels as the thickening cream in the bowl clogs the egg beater or the ice cream freezer,” explained the Commercial on Saturday, Dec. 14. A drop in temperature could solve the problem, said the newspapers, freezing over the entire river.

The city’s streetlights went out first. Later in the day, trolley magnate John R. Graham of the BR&E Co. warned that the number of cars might have to be reduced. All day Saturday crews of men were at work trying to keep the machinery going. It was a hard fight. Big masses of ice came over the dam, sometimes 2 feet and more in thickness and about of the consistency of slush.

By Christmas Eve, big ice jams had formed between Mount Hope and the Veazie Dam and further south between the Bangor-Brewer bridge and the Bangor Dam. Neither dynamite nor ice chisels helped. The Bangor Daily News warned that conditions paralleled those that led to the freshet in March 1902 knocking out the bridge between Bangor and Brewer.

Power demand was at a peak. Christmas lights blazed in downtown stores, and hundreds of shoppers were riding the trolleys. At the two power plants, steam boilers were running at full tilt in case water power proved inadequate. At Veazie nearly a train carload of coal a day was being burned to keep steam up, said the Commercial on News Year’s Eve.

The trolley system shut down late in the afternoon of Jan. 2 after private electricity customers turned on their lights. Passengers had to get out and walk. Trolley cars were left stranded all over the city. One was stalled in the middle of West Market Square. Another was blocking traffic in and out of Union Station in the crosswalk at Exchange and Washington streets. Some local cars reportedly were not moving until late at night.

Problems were exacerbated the next day at the Veazie station when “a big belt on one of the engines … parted and the capacity of the plant shrunk about 400 horsepower in less time than it takes to say it,” wrote a Commercial reporter on Jan. 4. The power went off briefly, and many trolley cars were out of commission again all night.

The icebound Veazie dam was attracting tourists. The jam below the dam was getting bigger. “Folks who want to see something that is the next thing to an Arctic glacier can see it by taking a trip to Mount Hope,” said the Commercial.

Inside the BR&E Co.’s power station, conditions “resembled a young inferno. The section devoted to water power was silent and cold, while the fire room and the portion of the main floor devoted to auxiliary steam engines was a bewilderment of blaze, steam and flying wheels,” explained the Bangor Daily News.

Then came some good news. “MERCURY TOOK A GREAT TUMBLE, proclaimed a News’ headline on Jan. 6. The temperature dropped about 40 degrees in 24 hours. A coat of surface ice across the river ended the conditions that had caused the crisis. Trolley cars were running on schedule.

Three days later, on the 9th, the port was declared closed, said the Commercial on Jan. 11. It had been virtually closed for weeks, “but at no time has the ice been so strong but that a tug could have forced its way up through it to any one of the wharves along the river front.”

A new record had been set, but river observers would argue about it for years, the reporter predicted. The closing was listed as Jan. 4 in future city directories. The latest closing before this had been on Dec. 30, 1877, if you didn’t count the years that the river had frozen, thawed and then frozen again.

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