“KEEP STREETS CLEAN,” read a headline at the top of a page in the Bangor Daily Commercial a century ago. The words were part fact and part exhortation. Bangor, like many cities, was trying to grapple with environmental messes – from horse pollution and dump proliferation to expectorating – that were growing with the population. New techniques and laws were necessary.

The story on June 25, 1908, announced that Street Commissioner Charles Woodbury had inaugurated a new system for keeping the streets clean. A permanent crew of seven men was engaged each day in “sweeping the pavings,” picking up waste paper and other rubbish and depositing it in cans located on the major downtown thoroughfares.

“During the day a cart makes a patrol of the principal streets and the cans are hauled away and emptied of the accumulated dirt and sweepings,” said the Commercial. “Dirt” was a euphemism for horse droppings. Despite the rise of the automobile, horses were still the principal means of transportation. A horse deposited between 15 and 35 pounds of manure a day, according to my informed source on this important subject, and it was a major pollution problem in crowded cities.

In dry weather, ground-up manure blew around, mixed with the dirt in the streets. When it rained, the streets became a quagmire. In some cities, crossing assistants helped people navigate the mix of mud and manure. Many people believed the odor alone could spread disease. By 1908, however, the medical community knew that flies alighting in this mess were a more likely cause of typhoid and other illnesses than were “vapors.” Bangor was not immune to these problems, although its description was muted in the local newspapers.

Thirty new garbage cans and five pushcarts to carry the cans had been added to the city’s street cleaning arsenal. “An idea of the amount of dirt that collects in Bangor’s principal business streets in a day may be gained through the fact that there are 30 cans and they are filled and emptied four times a day, making 120 cans of sweepings every fair day in the summer. On the rainy days when it is impossible to sweep the streets the crew is put to work keeping the crosswalks free from mud,” said the Commercial.

The average resident could do his share by visiting those cans when he had some bit of rubbish to jettison, advised the newspaper. The common trash found on the streets back then included peanut shells, burned matches, cigar and cigarette stubs, banana peels and scraps of paper.

Bangor was a horse-rich town and much mention of the mess they created would have offended many influential readers. The automobile was seen by some analysts as a way to clean up the horse problem, but autos would quickly create issues of their own. They outnumbered horses on the streets of New York, London and Paris by 1912, and the first city traffic jams were reported two years later after Henry Ford dropped the price of his Model T.

Spitting was another environmental problem that plagued Bangor and other communities a century ago. Not only was it disgusting, but many also feared it was a way to spread tuberculosis and other diseases. The issue had arisen two years before when the Bangor Daily News mounted an editorial campaign to get sweepers on the covered ends of the old toll bridge crossing the Penobscot between Bangor and Brewer to sweep during off hours so the dust stirred up would not infect commuters with TB germs deposited by those with the dread disease.

In April 1908, the City Council passed an ordinance banning spitting on sidewalks and in places of public amusement. The first arrest was made on June 24 when a young man from Bradley was fined $1 and $4 in costs for spitting on the floor of The Nickel, Bangor’s first movie theater.

The Bangor Daily News commented the next day, “This may seem like a light punishment considering that a similar offense in the larger cities usually brings a fine of $10, but it was the principle of the thing that counted. A few more arrested, members of the police force say, would do much to break up a nuisance which has become disgustingly prevalent mostly on the streets although public buildings have also suffered.”

Earlier in the year Bangor had taken action to tidy up and consolidate its multitude of public dumps as I described in a previous column. In this way, the Queen City and many other cities tried to clean up, little understanding that the environmental problems of that era would be outdistanced by a whole new set of problems in the next.

Additional details about urban horse pollution may be seen in an essay by Joel Tarr and Clay McShane posted on the Environmental Literacy Council’s Web site.

wreilly@bangordailynews.net