William Conners was the “Log King of the Penobscot,” declared the Bangor Daily Commercial on Nov. 2, 1907. When Conners died 14 years later at age 86, both the Bangor Daily News and the Commercial called him one of Maine’s most famous lumbermen.

What could one log driver have done to deserve such adulation in the land of the Bangor Tigers – those doughty knights of the cant dog who risked their lives herding logs down the Penobscot River to market?

Longevity gave Conners’ fame a boost a century ago, as well as an aura of nostalgia. Bangor was dying as a lumber port. It had been the lumber capital of the world once upon a time as everyone knew.

By 1907, when the Bangor Daily Commercial called him the Log King, Conners was completing his 43rd year as the contractor in charge of the Bangor Boom, the storage point for logs on their way to local sawmills and for lumber sawed up river destined for markets around the world. He’d been in charge since the Civil War.

A boom was a line of logs connected at the ends used to corral logs floating down the river. The Bangor Daily News described the Bangor Boom on Nov. 13, 1903: “The boom is partly above and partly below the great [Bangor Water Works] dam at the head of tidewater on the Penobscot, and within its enclosure are sorted and rafted all the logs from the headwaters that are intended for manufacturing in the steam mills at and below Bangor.

There are six of these mills – those of Morse & Co., F.H. Strickland, the Eastern Mfg. Co., Sargent Lumber Co., Lowell & Engel and the Sterns Lumber Co.”

William Conners was one of the last symbols of Bangor’s glory days when it was said you could cross the river between Bangor and Brewer by stepping from the deck of one sailing vessel to the next. By 1907, he was an old man who would retire two years later. When he was gone there would be only ghosts, and even they would disappear as the city turned its back on the river and its past.

Conners had come with his parents from Ireland at age 2. As a youth, he saw the river and the logs and the men in red shirts and calk boots, and he did some calculating. He and his brothers knew they could make a good living if they worked hard and took some risks. William began as a wedge boy, knocking together huge rafts of logs to float downriver to the Bangor Boom, the last collecting point at the end of a series of booms beginning north of Old Town. He advanced rapidly to camp boss in the woods where the trees were felled and from there to boss river driver.

“While there were many expert drivers and rafters in Bangor and all along the river for miles above, William Conners and his three brothers, John, Edward and Patrick, early gained distinction as fast and hard workers, afraid of nothing, knowing all the ways of the river and details of the business, and each of them having the knack of getting the best service out of a crew and keeping the men contented,” said his obituary in the Bangor Daily News on June 21, 1921.

Conners lumbered with the famous John Ross, the boss on the West Branch drive and the man who led a legendary expedition of Bangor Tigers in 1876 to drive logs down the Connecticut River from its headwaters to Hartford. Conners was also in the shipping business with fellow Irishmen Timothy Field and James O’Donahue, who got rich mining quartz in California. All three men had vessels in the West India trade named after them.

The Bangor Boom was an important link in the Queen City’s lumber economy. In 1885, the season began on May 15 and ended Nov. 3. Thirty men were employed driving in from the Penobscot Boom (the collection of booms north of Old Town) and 40 more in rafting and running at the Bangor Boom. The distance from Argyle to Bangor was 16 miles, and it required about eight days to bring down one of the rafts. Several dams had to be passed, said the Bangor Daily Commercial on Jan. 18, 1886.

The workers included drivers, rafters and pilots. In the early days, the rafts were propelled by scull oar men, and later they were hauled effortlessly by little steamers, one of which was named after Conners.

Navigating huge rafts of logs or lumber over dams or through the rapids could be dangerous, according to David Smith in his book “Lumbering in Maine, 1861-1960,” so it was no wonder that Conners had charge of the work for so long. Besides needing to be one step ahead of disaster, such as the year the boom broke and logs drifted all the way to Bucksport, political agility was required too.

One year Conners threatened to use force if the city didn’t prevent the dumping of sawdust, bark and other debris into the river that clogged the boom. There were battles with Great Northern Paper over control of the river drives and efforts to get the city to build a more commodious slip for rafting over its new dam at the Water Works. Conners was politically savvy and active in Irish-American causes. An “old-time Democrat,” he served on the Bangor City Council as well as two terms in the Legislature after he retired in 1909.

Near the end of his life, clever reporters concocted numbers to measure Conners’ greatness. He had handled not less than 4 billion feet of logs at the Bangor Boom, they said. “At the lowest estimate, the logs rafted and driven by William Conners would, if placed end to end, make a girdle of spruce, pine and hemlock four times around the world and leave enough over to build a big city,” reported the Commercial on May 26, 1921, shortly before his death.

The numbers often varied, but the writers’ intent did not. Conners’ career was a memorial. That amount of logs would never pass through Bangor again. Lumber shipments had dropped more than 80 percent since the peak in 1872. So had the number of vessels clearing the port. “A sailor would be a stranger there now,” said the Bangor Daily News in 1921. So would men like William Conners, Log King of the Penobscot.

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