Hotel curbed Bangor’s hobo problem

Bangor was swarming with hobos a century ago this fall. Some had made money digging potatoes in Aroostook County. They came south on the train to the Queen City, reported the Bangor Daily Commercial on Oct. 8, 1908. After landing in Northern Maine Junction in Hermon, where the B&A’s tracks crossed the Maine Central’s, they hung around for a while and then headed downtown. For every 10 hobos, about three headed west while the others made a beeline into Bangor.

“Fellow hoboes tell the men coming down from upriver that Bangor is a perfect paradise – people feed them well and when they refuse, it is easy enough to break into some place and get all they want to eat,” the reporter wrote.

Even though many of these men had money in their pockets, according to law enforcement officers, they delighted in avoiding train fare and stealing chickens to eat. Three men from Massachusetts and Rhode Island were arrested in October and given short jail sentences for vagrancy as an example to the others.

One farmer near Northern Maine Junction reported losing more than 300 chickens to hobos who cooked and ate them at their “lay-outs.” “In fact, he has found the chicken heads lying not far from his property showing the necks had been wrung,” reported the Commercial.

Tramps also broke into boxcars and stole liquor and other goods. “It is no uncommon sight in traveling along the Maine Central tracks to see hoboes’ wash strung out on a line and their pots and kettles over fires,” said the newspaper.

The railroads’ problems intensified in November. Hobos were heading south for warmer climes in growing numbers, prompting yet another story. This time a Boston man was fined and sentenced to two months in jail for evading carfare and for drunkenness. Besides riding on the “blind end” of trains, some fare evaders had begun hopping into coaches in downtown Bangor and jumping out at Northern Maine Junction before the conductor had time to make his rounds.

“Here in Bangor it is a frequent sight to see a bunch of hoboes waiting at the westerly end of the Maine Central drawbridge on Front Street for the 1:45 express to come along. As the train does not go very fast over the bridge, it is very easy for them to board it after it has crossed the bridge,” said the story on Nov. 4.

That fall the Twentieth Century Club, a progressive men’s organization that sought solutions to the city’s problems, decided something needed to be done about all the homeless men.

“This is the age of the homeless man,” professor Robert Sprague declared. Sprague, chairman of the economics department at the University of Maine, was one of the experts summoned to address a club meeting on Nov. 3. He blamed the problem on the Industrial Revolution, saying the installation of modern machinery in factories and mills had put many men out of work.

The issue in Bangor, as summed up in the Bangor Daily News the morning after the meeting, was “the best way to care for the large floating population of laborers who generally congregate at the foot of Exchange Street, and in the square of lumbermen’s hotels bounded by Hancock, Washington, Exchange and French streets.”

The Rev. Frederick Palladino of the First Methodist Episcopal Church added, “Our city is built up on the industry of the forest which makes it the headquarters of the woodsman, the river driver and the sailor. This besides having our share of the ordinary unskilled laborer and the vagrant of various sorts. What is being done for them?” His address to the Twentieth Century Club was printed in full in the Commercial on Nov. 7.

One organization, The Salvation Army, was aiming to do something for homeless men. For some time the newspapers had been telling of the organization’s efforts to start a workingmen’s hotel or a “poor man’s hotel,” as a headline in the Bangor Daily News described it.

The organization had bought a lot for the hotel on Harlow Street in September. The plan was to build a four-story brick building with about 45 rooms and adjoining apartments, said Ensign Arthur E. Armstrong, who had been in the city for just a year, according to a story in the Commercial on Sept. 23.

A store offering free and reduced-priced items soon would open on Franklin Street, according to the newspaper on Oct. 16. The proceeds would help build the hotel. A horse and its keep recently had been given to the organization, which had purchased two express wagons to pick up donations for the store. One wagon had a black cover with the words “Salvation Army Relief Dep’t” in yellow letters.

The history of the Workingmen’s Hotel has yet to be written. As I was researching this column at the Bangor Public Library, I found a three-page, handwritten note by Ensign Armstrong outlining its history until 1915.

Construction did not begin until 1913 at 55 York St. at its junction with French Street. The dedication on Oct. 17, 1914, was attended by Eva Booth, commander of The Salvation Army. She pronounced the new building, which decades later was demolished as part of urban renewal, one of the best of its kind in the United States.

“During the first six months we housed and fed 9,558 woodsmen and laborers,” Armstrong wrote. The hotel had about 40 beds on the second floor and 35 on the third floor, said the Bangor Daily News in describing the dedication. Perhaps after that there were a few less hobo camps along the train tracks.

Wayne E. Reilly may be reached at wer@bangordailynews.net. Tom Larcombe and Dick Shaw contributed information for this column.