What exactly was J.L. Grant building in the dilapidated icehouse he rented on the Brewer waterfront when fire broke out Thursday afternoon, July 29, 1909? The cavernous building, one of several that either burned or collapsed as the ice industry faded, was turned into “a flaming cauldron,” said the Bangor Daily News the next morning. Also heavily damaged was one of the area’s oldest businesses, the Marine Railway & Lumber Co., located next door at 193 South Main St. Grant’s project was “the great Brewer mystery, a mystery that demands the talent of a Sherlock Holmes,” pronounced the newspaper. Brewer had been “all agog” over this mystery for some time.
Some said Grant was constructing a flying machine. Others thought it was a motorboat. Jokers suggested it was “a deodorizer for the tannery brook,” or “a new bridge for a Christmas present to the city.” Perhaps the most incredible theory of all, however, was the one receiving the most attention. Was the Bangor carpenter building a perpetual motion machine? Was he about to unlock the secret of free energy? And what, if anything, did Grant’s jealously guarded project have to do with the fire that nearly swept the Brewer waterfront and crossed the river to Bangor starting several small fires there, one of several precursors to the Queen City’s Great Fire two years later?
“Brewer suffered another disastrous fire Thursday afternoon when the plant of the Marine Railway & Lumber Co. was practically destroyed, together with three dwellings owned by the Railway company, [and] an empty ice house of the American Ice Co. used as a carpenter’s shop by J.L. Grant of Bangor,” a Bangor Daily News reporter wrote for the next morning’s paper. Also destroyed was the three-masted schooner Rosa Mueller, which was being repaired at the marine railway company, and about 250,000 feet of hard pine lumber, along with a shop formerly operated by H.O. Eaton and all his “shipsmith machinery.” The direction of the wind luckily saved Brewer from much worse destruction.
The “entire population of Brewer” turned out to see the fire. They turned the hill black across the road at Oak Hill cemetery. “Automobiles drove hither and thither, teams jostled, fire carts clanged a right of way. Twelve hydrants were in service. The big pumps at the [nearby] Eastern Mfg. Co. were at emergency pressure and at the Smith Planing Mill Co.’s plant the entire crew went about the work of protection, the big streams of water playing upon all buildings within reach,” said the newspaper. Meanwhile, hundreds of Bangoreans sought a closer look by crossing the bridge from Bangor to Brewer or swarming aboard the little Bon Ton Ferry until it was dangerously overloaded.
The marine railway was one of the pioneer industries of Brewer, said the newspaper. Its current owners, who had bought out E. and I.K. Stetson in 1907, were insured for only about 25 percent of their losses. “Many workers” would lose their jobs. The company clerk, John C. Wilson, was the major shareholder of the uninsured Rosa Mueller.
Rumors about what Grant had been doing in the icehouse since May turned into suspicions that it had caused the fire. “Loads of hemlock boards have been carried and the teamster told to leave them without. Doors have been closed and locked. No loiterers, no visitors, no one save those at work within have been allowed to look through the barred doors,” said the Bangor Daily News. Melted solder reportedly had been seen outside the building.
An unidentified man claimed to have seen a mysterious contraption — a wheel — in the icehouse, reported the Bangor Daily Commercial He had visited the plant a few weeks earlier, and, unexpectedly discovering the door unlocked, had entered. “He found a huge platform high up in the top of the ice house and an inexplicable contrivance, the use of which he could not make out or get a satisfactory explanation of but knowing of another somewhat similar arrangement attempted by the same man at Sargent’s ice house in South Brewer some years ago for a Bangor man, he at once thought it was a perpetual motion wheel,” reported the Commercial.
The next day, July 31, the Bangor Daily News published an interview with J.L. Grant. The cause of the fire was spontaneous combustion, said the carpenter. “The walls of the old ice house,” said Grant, “had so rotted away that they were honeycombed with openings. Through these openings the sawdust filling [formerly used to preserve the ice] ran out, covering the ground in all directions.” Two weeks ago on a hot day a great many small fires had started in the sawdust carpeting. “We put them out without much trouble, but they kept starting up again, and so on the whole we had several hours work.” Grant said he had notified the Brewer city marshal of the conditions, suggesting that the sawdust be removed, but the official had never come to investigate.
Then Grant produced William Campbell, a teamster for Morse & Co. He had actually witnessed the start of the fire on Thursday. Campbell had delivered a load of lumber at the door of the icehouse. “Pretty soon I noticed that the sawdust was all afire,” said the teamster. “Little tongues of smoke and flame shot up in a dozen different places.” Grant and his workers came out and put the fire out, and Campbell kept on unloading. “It wasn’t long, however, before the fires broke out again. This time they got beyond control, and the whole plant was swept from end to end,” Campbell told the newspaper.
Grant added that since he took possession of the icehouse, there had never been anything in it except “green hemlock boards, spruce for staging, pine planks, pine shipping boards and nails. … There was no solder, nothing combustible. If anyone can prove that there was anything in that old building except wood and nails, I’ll give him $1,000.” The carpenter continued to refuse to discuss what he was building. However, he said emphatically, “This talk about a perpetual motion wheel is bad nonsense.”
Meanwhile, modern readers can safely assume the only perpetual motion having anything to do with the icehouse fire was occurring at The Nickel, across the river in Bangor. Two days after the fire, the Queen City’s first movie house advertised “Views of the Big Brewer Fire” along with several movies and a song by Miss Miller. These views were shown over and over again day and night until the public had seen enough.
An illustrated collection of Wayne E. Reilly’s columns titled “Remembering Bangor: The Queen City Before the Great Fire” is available at bookstores. Comments about this column may be sent to him at wer@bangordailynews.net