“ICE CLOSING IN,” announced a headline in the Bangor Daily News a century ago. “Rockland Has But a Single Channel – Belfast Bay is Frozen Over – Dark Prospects.”

Just as it had the previous winter, the dreaded “ice embargo” was about to strike again, solidifying harbors and clogging channels in an unusual show of Mother Nature’s ill humor.

Use of the word embargo to describe an ice jam sounds odd today. But a frozen coastline was embargoed in every sense of the word, bringing the seagoing economy to a halt, blocking the travelers and the freight that depended on steam and sail power and keeping the fishermen and other maritime workers in port.

It had already been a long, hard winter.

“People in general are of the opinion that this has been about the meanest week in the meanest, most disagreeable month that poor old Bangor has known for ages. … And still the wind blows,” a reporter wrote ominously after a blizzard raked the state late in January.

Then came the warning a few days later on Feb. 3, 1905, that the ice was closing in.

“Another embargo is feared in the down river and bay ports. … Belfast Bay was frozen up from Northport to Belfast and almost out to Long Island, but the steamer Penobscot was able to break a channel through on Thursday.

“The small boats are having a hard time of it. The Silver Star running between Belfast and Castine started from Castine Tuesday and got as far as Turtle Head and went back. The Golden Rod is tied up at Belfast. The Pemaquid is going over her route but is badly behind time in getting back to Bucksport. At Rockland the harbor is frozen over except a single channel from Tillson’s Wharf out by the breakwater. … A few more days of cold weather will close up Penobscot Bay.”

Three days later, it was formally announced. “MAINE COAST ICEBOUND,” declared a headline on a story out of Portland. Fishermen reported coves and channels as far east as Mount Desert were closed to any vessels but the larger steamers.

“The Ice King is up to his old tricks,” declared the NEWS, focusing its daily stories on Penobscot Bay. Within two days, a huge ice jam stretching between Fort Point and Orland had sealed off the river, isolating Bucksport.

Belfast harbor and the western side of the bay at least to Northport were frozen hard, allowing people to cross on the ice to and from Islesboro with teams and heavy cargoes if they wished. Conditions on the eastern side of the bay were better, allowing traffic to Castine, sometimes with the help of the U.S. revenue cutter Woodbury.

But soon the Woodbury was crippled with a damaged propeller, disabled from its efforts to smash channels through the ice. Officials said they would try to enlist the services of the cutter Algonquin, a powerful steel vessel.

Conditions vacillated for weeks. Steamers tied up with no place to go. Fishermen mended their nets.

Because it was bad for business, some harbors wanted it known they were not jammed up. Newspapers in Bath and Portland got into a row over which harbor had the least ice.

The Eastport correspondent to the NEWS denied the harbor was frozen, citing the extreme tides and swift currents of Passamaquoddy Bay. Ice floes, however, had jammed under the long wooden toll bridge connecting the island city to the mainland, threatening to carry the bridge away.

Meanwhile, the steam lighter Reliance arrived from Portland with a load of lumber for the new Northern Maine Seaport Railroad’s wharves at Cape Jellison. After unloading some of its cargo at Castine, the vessel proved to be an effective icebreaker, smashing its way across the bay to Stockton Springs to keep the big industrial project on schedule.

All parties to the Bangor & Aroostook RR’s expansion, however, were not so successful. One contractor lost a pair of horses, a donkey engine and a boiler in 30 feet of water when he fell through the ice trying to cross the river between Bucksport and Winterport.

Another ice-related mishap occurred at High Island when the schooner Millville of Camden sank under the pressure of the ice while taking on a load of granite bound for Philadelphia.

One would have thought the cold would have improved the state’s ice harvest, but such was not the case. Maine’s crop that year would have been much larger, a news story said, had the extreme cold not enabled ice harvesters on the Hudson River and around Philadelphia and Baltimore to obtain a full supply locally.

Despite such setbacks, some people were having fun.

On Feb. 14, the newspaper reported that three Castine boys, Joseph Wallace and Fred and Arthur Sawyer, had walked on the ice from a spot near Block House Point in Castine to Belfast, returning home the next day.

Sleigh riding or walking across the ice between Belfast and Islesboro was becoming a common occurrence. A photograph published on March 3 showed two sleighs going off on the ice at Belfast harbor toward Islesboro. Ice boating and skating were other forms of transportation.

A piece in the Belfast Republican Journal on Feb. 9 traced the history of ice jams between 1780 and 1875, the last time such an event had occurred (except for the previous winter of 1904). It said J.Y. McClintock in 1835 was the first person to travel by sleigh from Belfast to Islesboro. In 1849, 15 people arrived in Belfast from Castine by iceboat.

Bangoreans, meanwhile, were able to sit back and make smug remarks. Situated so far north on the river, the Queen City’s harbor, after all, was iced in every winter.

“Indeed, Bangor has learned from experience that one may still be happy, though no steamboats arrive in port and no sailing craft embark for months at a time. We put by our supplies of coal and grain before heavy frosts come, after which we can do as we choose,” said an editorial.

By the beginning of March, the jam began to weaken. The Reliance was able to deliver railroad material up Eastern Bay to Cape Jellison without much trouble. And the jam between Fort Point and Orland was too weak to use as a footbridge.

On March 8, it was reported that two schooners imprisoned in the ice at Rockland for six weeks had been freed by the cutter Algonquin, which made a channel through an ice field a mile long. Then the vessel headed up the bay to Fort Point to work on the jam there.

On March 9, the NEWS proclaimed “Ice Embargo Was Raised” after the Reliance “crunched and ground and rammed and jammed and butted and pounded” its way to Bucksport, where tons of railroad supplies were accumulating on the docks.

“The river is still full of floating ice and difficult to navigate, but it is now possible for a steamer to go from Winterport to the sea by the eastern bay,” the paper reported. Belfast Harbor to Islesboro and west was still frozen solid, however.

On March 14, the paper printed what many readers wanted to hear. The steamer Pemaquid, trapped for weeks at Bucksport, had resumed its regular daily trips between Bucksport, Castine, Camden and Rockland. It would be a couple of more weeks before the Port of Bangor was open for navigation.

An editorial writer speculated that many years hence, someone would write a history column about the harsh winter of 1904-1905. But would anyone believe it?

“Will he dare to tell his readers that during March, 1905, the sink spouts in country houses froze up overnight, so they had to be thawed with hot water the next morning? Will he record that vegetables, which had kept unharmed in country cellars all through the winter, froze and spoiled in March? Can he gather courage to inform his contemporaries that snowbanks remained unshrunken in the fields on March 15?” this editorial writer wanted to know.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews

.net.