What may have been the first police chase through Bangor in an automobile occurred a century ago. Belfast officers chugged through the Queen City of the East in hot pursuit of horse thieves.

Because cops didn’t have patrol cars back then, the automobile was borrowed. The 60-horsepower Thomas Flyer was the most powerful auto ever to cruise through town, according to the Bangor Daily News on June 19, 1908. Fred W. Kruger, whose fine driving mare Molly had been whisked away from its East Belfast abode, was also on board in what may have been the first Keystone Kops scene in the area.

That was a time of glorious firsts for the motorcar. Maine had nearly 3,000 registered by the summer of 1908, and they were becoming a common sight in cities like Bangor.

“JOHN MCGREGOR GOES HUNTING IN AN AUTO,” announced a large headline in the Bangor Daily Commercial on Dec. 10, 1907. McGregor was certainly one of the first people to try out this method for bagging game. The Lincoln resident drove to New Brunswick and “came home with all that the law allows.” A photograph accompanying the story clearly shows a couple of moose heads decorating his machine.

Automobiles also were being used for the first time for preaching and politicking.

“GOSPEL FROM AUTO: Local YMCA Spreading Religion in Modern Manner,” the Commercial announced over a story on Aug. 4, 1908. General Secretary Jordan of the Bangor Y loaded up an automobile belonging to C.F. Bryant with “a speaker, a singer and an accompanist with a small portable organ” and took the Lord’s message to George’s Corner, East Holden, where 70 people were given guidance from under the shade of a convenient tree. A company of volunteer singers in a second auto owned by W.A. Danforth accompanied this traveling road show a week later.

At least one important politician, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, also discovered that the horseless carriage was an effective way to spread the message that summer. Bert M. Fernald made “a meteoric transit” across northern Maine hopping from one borrowed auto to another. Fernald breezed out of Bangor at 7 a.m. Aug. 17 in a Peerless touring car owned by John Legett of Houlton. After making brief stops in a host of small towns on the way to Houlton, he picked up a ride in another auto owned by Thomas Phair on the way to Presque Isle.

Democrats tried to make a little hay from this elitist way of campaigning. In Fernald’s defense, the Bangor Daily News harrumphed in an editorial on Aug. 6 that “as if the fact a man rode in a motor car stamped him as belonging to the aristocracy of the earth, and among the hyperaristocracy of Maine.”

Speed records, it seemed, were being broken weekly. In January, James A. Marr and B. Tague, two automobile salesmen from Portland, made the distance between Bangor and the Forest City in five hours, 30 minutes in a 6-cylinder Oldsmobile runabout, breaking “all existing records.” Actually the trip was 45 minutes longer because the men had to repair a broken spring and two punctured tires, said the Commercial on Jan. 27.

While no mention was made of the weather, obviously the sun was bright and the dirt roads were frozen solid to have enabled such a feat. Most people parked their autos in a garage for the winter. Charles E. Clark, an automobile agent, gave a demonstration of winter driving skills for brave souls in a Model D Maxwell touring car. Clark made a “remarkable showing of speed and power” on the snow and ice of Bangor streets, said the Bangor Daily News on Feb. 29.

Such reports increasingly enraged the large number of people who despised automobiles. When the Bangor Daily News wrote up another fast winter auto trip, an angry reader, A. Rackliff of Unity, wrote a letter to the editor, calling autoists “butchers”: “How many horses did the automobile frighten on that trip? How much property was destroyed? Also how many human lives were endangered. Some will run those death traps … unreasonably fast and then boast of it, when if I should go on our roads with a team and do half the damage … I should expect to be imprisoned for life.”

I already have written a column about Bangor’s first auto accident fatality, little Freddie O’Connor, son of a junk dealer, struck down in June by a speeding motorcar on State Street. The driver, a chauffeur for a wealthy merchant, was charged with involuntary manslaughter but found not guilty. At the time of the accident, there were claims the police were not enforcing speed laws, especially when autos were owned by rich people.

Two weeks later, on June 16, another chauffeur, E.O. Follansbee, was found guilty of “fast automobile driving” and fined $20 and costs. The owner of the car was prominent lumberman Ezra L. Sterns.

Court testimony printed in the Commercial said Follansbee had been going 18 to 20 mph, way over the speed limit, when he swerved around the corner from Park Street to head up State Street hill and nearly hit a public carriage. Follansbee argued that he couldn’t possibly have been going faster than 10 mph because he had just started up and he was only in second gear and going up a hill.

In handing down his sentence, Judge Chapman decreed that from then on speeders would be fined for the first offense and jailed for the second. Bangor was getting tough on devil carts.

wreilly@bangordailynews.net