During the Progressive Era a century ago hardly a week went by when somebody in Bangor didn’t speak up in favor of reforms to improve life in the Queen City of the East.
It was time Bangor “thought of something besides booze,” chided civic leader Franklin E. Bragg in a speech to the Woman’s Alliance, one of several groups dedicated to city improvement, the Bangor Daily News reported on Jan. 12, 1915. Bragg’s subject was “dumps, billboards and parks” — beautification of the landscape in other words, one of several themes that interested progressive reformers in cities and towns across America.
Many Bangoreans, like Bragg, who was treasurer of N.H. Bragg and Sons, were tired of debating prohibition all the time. What was needed were “numerous playgrounds … a systematic park system, … attention to unsightly backyards and dumps and streets … and finally he laid stress on the advantages of having a city planning commission.”
Tree planting, consolidating neighborhood dumps and educating children to pick up rubbish were all part of his plan for a brighter Bangor.
What explained the progressive hotbed that Bangor had become? In an editorial. “Bangor forever!,” the Bangor Daily News may have touched upon one significant factor — lots of money.
No longer “the lumber capital of the world,” the city had plenty of cash stored up in banks and lots more passing through its cash registers. The author compared 1915 with 1880.
“The 25,000 people who now are here have a great deal more of everything good than did the 16,857 people who were here in 1880,” the newspaper said on Feb. 26, 1915. Per capita wealth had doubled in that period and people weren’t afraid to make investments to improve things.
“Capital is largely used now to make life more comfortable, safe and happy. In 1880 there were no paved streets, no electric or other street or suburban cars, no hospitals, no fine school buildings save one, few church edifices, no big city hall, no modern court house, no well-kept parks, very little of the present day activity toward social betterment – in short not much of anything that we now have to make existence pleasant,” the editorial writer enthused.
What the Bangor Daily News editorial referred to as “social betterment” hung over the city like a dark cloud. With waves of immigrants flooding into the country, including Bangor, and with horrible scourges like TB, typhoid and other diseases with their greatest impact in the lower classes, “social betterment” was at the top of many people’s agenda.
Bangor also had a spectacle all its own each year reminding it of the crowded masses and the potential for social disruption. Thousands of loggers passed through the city on their way to and from the logging camps and the river drives.
These men emptied their pockets in Bangor, but they also caused all sorts of social problems from brawls to disease. Sometimes there were no jobs for them, and they hung around the streets penniless for days on end. Dozens ended up sleeping at the police station in the spring of 1914 and 1915.
Here are a few of the social reforms proposed in the early months of 1915 in Bangor as reported in the city’s two daily newspapers.
Sheriff J. Fred O’Connell was advocating expansion of the county jail to include “a boys’ dormitory,” a women’s reformatory and an exercise yard. Women and boys were housed in the same area as adult male prisoners. Exercise options were limited. Healthy prisoners were often confined with others afflicted with TB and other illnesses.
The city farm or poor house had similar problems. People with tuberculosis were kept in substandard quarters away from healthy inmates. A debate was underway in 1915 among the mayor and city councilors over whether to build a separate “camp” or sanitarium for the sick away from the main building located on lower Main Street.
Mrs. Frank Hinckley gave a talk to the Woman’s Alliance about the neglect of health laws and disease prevention in Bangor. She recommended more testing of area dairy cows. The year before only 23 percent of local milk dealers said their cows had been inspected for disease in the past year.
She also called for the hiring of a school nurse to inspect students for diseases, especially tuberculosis.
The debate over a woman’s reformatory, mentioned by Sheriff O’Connell, extended all the way to Augusta, where lawmakers held a hearing on Feb. 18.
Miss Marion Porter, secretary of the Associated Charities of Bangor, described how the Queen City had become a place “where vice and immorality were rampant, and pitfalls lurked at every step for the girl from the country,” the Bangor newspapers said.
Porter said she had been “maligned” in Bangor for making the same comments, but that she would not take back a single word. Conditions in Bangor “were terrible and ought not to exist in a civilized community.”
Bangor was a magnet for girls from the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Often they were illiterate and they had trouble competing for jobs. “All they were fitted for was housework, dish washers, or to work in hotels and mills. Why, some of them cannot even sew on a button,” Miss Porter said.
“The downward path for these girls is easy, and the steps are made easy for them. Most of them come without money and with so little education that they cannot go among people who would help them…
“There are a great many women walking the streets of Bangor who are spreading their creed of immorality among the country girls and among some city girls. If these conditions exist in Bangor, and they do, then they must exist in the rest of the state,” Miss Porter claimed.
Bangor police chief Thomas O’Donohue followed Miss Porter to the podium where he mentioned there had been “a general cleaning out of the city, but I am frank to say that it has meant but a scattering over the rest of the state.” The Bangor newspapers had covered in their news columns very little of this “cleaning out,” but a glance at O’Donohue’s municipal report that year outlined some more of the story.
The “clean-up” had been made of all “disorderly houses with the result that more than 15 well-known places have been closed, the proprietors and inmates having left the city and today the city is in excellent health as regards this class of places,” Chief O’Donohue said in his report for March 1, 1914-March 1, 1915.
Temperance and women’s suffrage activist Deborah Knox Livingstone told the lawmakers that another factor in the city’s immorality problem was the “30,000 men” that pass through Bangor in the course of a year on their way to and from the lumbering regions.
“One may understand what kind of women this brings to the city,” she said.
She added that a state reformatory would be “a preventative work, a continuation of the work of the Industrial School for Girls at Hallowell. It is incomprehensible that there should not be some such adequate recourse in Maine to care for those girls who are more sinned against than sinning.”
Other reformers advocated expansion of the Good Samaritan Home on Third Street, a place for unwed mothers and their babies.
Meanwhile, the Committee of 100 Bangor Businessmen was raising money to help support the Salvation Army’s “workingman’s hotel” that had recently opened on French Street. Single men trying to avoid the temptations encountered in the loggers’ boarding houses could stay there.
The efforts mentioned here were only the tip of an ever expanding iceberg. Gradually a social safety net for the poor and unfortunate, the ill and the downtrodden, would emerge from this maze of private charitable efforts, but not before government tax money provided by the income tax, another reform of the era, was made available to expand their activities.
Wayne E. Reilly’s column on Bangor a century ago appears in the newspaper every other Monday. His latest book, Hidden History of Bangor: From Lumbering Days to the Progressive Era, is available where books are sold. Comments can be sent to him at wreilly.bdn@gmail.com