In 1908, Bangor put on the dog

DOG SHOW AT THE FAIR, announced a headline in the Bangor Daily Commercial on Aug. 2, 1908. The event at the Eastern Maine State Fair in Bangor was to be supervised under American Kennel Club rules. It would be the first dog show ever held in Bangor, the newspaper said. Up to 300 dogs would be accommodated.

Distinguished dogs from all over the nation would be there, as well as highly respected Bangor dogs, including Forrest J. Martin’s mastiffs and D.F. Snow’s Great Dane. Dogs did not have to have a pedigree, however. Any dog was welcome. Doubtlessly as they read this, many Bangoreans glanced over in the corner at their mutts scratching and wondered if they might be worth tidying up for the show.

Not much has been written about Bangor dogdom as far as I know, so I did a little research in the old newspapers and this is what I found.

If you owned a dog in Bangor a century ago, it might well have been a Boston terrier named Teddy, after the popular President Theodore Roosevelt. These were the most popular breed and the most popular name back then, according to a report in the Bangor Daily Commercial on the city’s dog population on July 13, 1907.

The Queen City had about 960 dogs. Actually there were probably more, the reporter suspected. Back then dogs were kept track of as personal property by the tax assessor’s office. The reporter suspected some people lied about it to avoid paying for a dog license.

“However, 960 dogs are a good many and if they were all set howling at once against all the tin horns of the Fourth of July they would certainly win out,” the reporter surmised.

Styles in dogs were changing. “There was a time when the black and tan was an immense favorite, but today you can find hardly a dozen in the whole town.

The spotted coach dog was another favorite a dozen years or so ago, but they are almost extinct now in Bangor. The Newfoundland is another which has seemingly lost favor. … The Scotch terrier, on the other hand is gaining greatly in popularity, while the shepherd retains the friendship of man which he has always enjoyed,” the reporter noted. Cocker spaniels were also rising on the list as were certain types of setters, pointers and terriers.

As for names, those ran in fashionable streaks as well. A few years ago Rover had been the clear favorite, but no more. Prince had been wildly popular too as had Gyp, Major and Shep, but all were now passe.

Teddy had taken over as the doggie name of the moment thanks to the notoriety of the energetic president who barked a lot. Other names that had risen in the ranks were Nero, Sport, Kiko and Moxie. There were plenty of Busters as well. Some female names – Flossie, Pansy, Gypsy, Daisy, Mischief and Jessie – continued to be as popular now as then, whenever “then” was. This did not seem to be a very scientific study.

Then there were a few oddities. One dog was named Kitty and someone had named a male bulldog She. Admiral George Dewey, the hero in the Spanish-American War, and Richard Carvel, the title of a popular novel, were walking the streets of Bangor on four legs, as were Dago, Ivan, Togo and Binko.

A year later, a Commercial reporter set out to write another dog story, probably to satisfy the insatiable appetite of some editor for this kind of fare. The reporter decided this year to focus on the subject of what happened to unlicensed dogs. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

F.M. Douglass had been appointed the city’s dog constable. One of his jobs was to get rid of unlicensed dogs, and he appears to have set about doing it with a passion. Douglass kept a kind of “dogs’ rogue gallery,” the reporter wrote in a Commercial story on June 12, 1908. He carried a camera, and whenever he came across a dog with no collar or license, he took “a view” of the unfortunate canine and posted it in his collection.

Douglass also carried a gun. If he ran across the same dog again and identified it by means of his doggie gallery, “he promptly dispatches the dog to the happy hunting ground,” the reporter noted. “Some he shoots right on the spot, while others have a short time in which to prepare for death in an out-of-the-way place.” The latter situations probably occurred when there were ladies and children about who just might object, perhaps hysterically.

As of June 12, Douglass said he had “sent about 80 dogs to the happy hunting grounds of dogdom, but he hasn’t commenced yet, so he says, and the chances are that there will be many new faces in the happy hunting grounds shortly,” reported the scribe with a gleeful insensitivity that no sensible editor would allow in a newspaper today.

A former dog constable, Thomas Hanover, had been a bit more humane. He “had an elaborate system for disposing of unlicensed dogs. He maintained a large, airtight tank at his Columbia street establishment and by means of chloroform got rid of his victims,” the reporter continued.

Hanover was indeed a saint. But it’s safe to say that in some Bangor neighborhoods a hue and cry went up whenever the dog constable was seen coming around the corner, and small boys grabbed their favorite pups and ran in the house.

wreilly@bangordailynews.net