Bangor had set a new record for public intoxication, it was announced a century ago. The police arrested 2,513 drunks found staggering down Exchange Street or lying in the gutters of Pickering Square or sprawled in one of the city’s other “moist districts.” An average of seven inebriates a day was jailed, amounting to 90 percent of the arrests in 1907 in the Queen City.

The newspapers chortled with glee. The Bangor Daily News supported prohibition (more or less), and the Bangor Daily Commercial opposed it. Both papers, however, despised the Sturgis Commission, the state’s prohibition enforcement agency that had taken up residence in the city in August in an all-out effort to shut off the taps.

By now, Bangor was supposed to be “as dry as the Congressional record,” sniped the Bangor Daily News on March 4, 1908. “You may sneer at this and say you don’t believe, but that’s because you’re prejudiced, probably. You might have a little respect for the majesty of the law, and be polite and pretend to think so.”

The reporter continued sarcastically, “This breaks all records for debauchery in Bangor … Considering the fact that the Bangor police … never go out of their way to arrest a man who seems to be able to ‘navigate’ … and that hundreds who actually get drunk do not appear in the statistics, it would seem that prohibition must have slipped a cog somewhere around here.”

Since their arrival the previous August, the Sturgis men had left a trail of mayhem worthy of the Keystone Kops. Everywhere they went they attracted crowds of hooting and hollering onlookers. In their first week on the job, they broke down the wrong door to Baur’s Hide Shop instead of Newman’s grog shop in Haymarket Square, nearly touching off a riot. Their activities did touch off a riot in November in Old Town, when a large mob armed with stones and eggs trapped a squad of deputies for hours in a rat-infested cellar full of liquor.

Sturgis men engaged in all sorts of madcap antics including climbing up a dumbwaiter shaft to the third-floor kitchen at the Manhattan Cafe where a cook was pouring liquor down the sink drain. Sometimes their ethics were questioned as when they were accused of planting liquor or paying boys to spy on suspects.

Their violent tactics occasionally verged on comedic overkill. One of the most destructive raids occurred at the Eastern Express Co. at 53 Pickering Square. The mail-order liquor business had erected a seemingly indestructible wall sheathed in “boiler plate” to protect its backroom bar from easy entrance. Eight Sturgis deputies armed with sledgehammers, crowbars, axes and a large iron hook disassembled most of the interior of the building early in March, smashing through the iron wall into the barroom.

“They left the walls of the building and three cash registers in the show window – very little more,” noted the Bangor Daily News on March 2.

Bangor’s liquor dealers learned how to adapt. Much of the trade went underground. A small army of pocket peddlers wearing long coats with big pockets sold in streets and alleys. “Kitchen bars” run by otherwise respectable matrons operated out of homes and boardinghouses.

The remaining saloons were well-disguised. Lookouts, known as a group as “the wireless,” stood outside doorways or on rooftops looking up and down the street for lawmen. Armored doors with heavy locks and peepholes allowed bouncers to size up potential customers.

Once inside, a seeker of “moist goods” might have to wait a little while as the man in charge whistled in a peculiar manner up a dumbwaiter or to a waiting boy who bobbed up from a chair in the corner and climbed into a nearby loft or down into a cellar or ran outside to a nearby stable.

Liquor dealers devised elaborate “hides.” Loose bricks and floorboards, kitchen stoves and furnaces, long pipelines from barrels located far from the bar all were used to conceal the goods. “But this one thing is certain: The liquor which has been ordered is forthcoming and in any quantity that may be desired,” declared a Bangor Daily News editorial on Oct. 17.

Another thing was certain. The Sturgis deputies were successful in bringing many lawbreakers to justice. The most publicized case during this period was against the local aerie of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a popular social club at 89 Main St. with 350 members, many with Irish surnames. Peter Curran, the steward, was convicted of “maintaining a liquor nuisance” and “being a common seller,” but it was made clear it was the club on trial, not Curran.

Much of the testimony revolved around whether the club was buying and selling liquor at its “buffets,” or whether consumption was limited to bottles belonging to individual members and kept stored in personal lockers. “If, as alleged, the Eagles are maintaining a nuisance in their clubrooms, then the Tarratine Club and the Elks lodge are equal violators of the law,” complained the club’s lawyer in the Bangor Daily News on Nov. 12.

While the Daily News and many of its Republican readers favored “resubmission” of the liquor question to Maine voters, and the Daily Commercial and many of its Democratic readers wanted the law repealed, prohibition was spreading across the nation. Maine had stood alone in banning liquor sales in 1851. By the beginning of 1908, there were five other dry states – Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma and North Dakota, said the Commercial on Feb. 18. Many other states had local-option prohibition, and the sale of liquor was banned in jurisdictions containing a third of the nation’s population.

Despite evidence that Maine’s law was working poorly, the nation’s prohibition movement rolled on. Other places naively jumped on the bandwagon as the country headed for the great national experiment that would begin in 1919.

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