Springtime unfolded quickly and methodically in Bangor a century ago. If you followed the flow of annual events covered by the city’s two daily papers, let’s say between ice-out in Bangor harbor and Easter Sunday, you could learn just about everything worth knowing about that short season between winter and summer that disappears in a blink.
The first sign that spring was in the air — a sign that could only make saloon keepers happy — occurred like clockwork when the logging camps began to lay off workers.
“LOGGERS RIOT ON AROOSTOOK TRAIN,” announced a headline for one of these annual events in the Bangor Daily News on March 18, 1915. The subhead continued, “Plenty of Refreshments, Then War, When Jackman Crew ‘Came Out’” — came out of the woods, that is, from one or more logging camps.
Train windows were smashed along with a few heads. Four men were arrested and brought to the Bangor Police Station handcuffed. That was how many loggers celebrated the arrival of spring.
The really big announcement though — the real start of springtime in Bangor — was announced in the papers four days later when the ice “sneaked” down the river on March 20.
“PORT OF BANGOR NOW OPEN TO THE WORLD,” proclaimed the grandiose headline in the Bangor Daily News. It was the earliest opening since 1903, according to “people who have nothing to do but keep run of such things,” the reporter continued.
The river was still empty of everything but cold water except for the little Bon Ton ferry, which immediately began making runs between Bangor and Brewer, dodging the few ice floes that were still heading toward Hampden.
Three days later, the first Boston Boat arrived, announced the Bangor Daily News. It was the steamer Camden, one of the Great White Flyers, turbine-powered monoliths about the length of a football field. Capt. Frank Brown was at the wheel.
“There is but little freshet on the river and she had no trouble in docking,” the reporter reminded potentially squeamish passengers. On March 29, four trips a week would commence with the Camden and the Belfast taking turns beginning at India Wharf in Boston.
A few days later, the BDN told readers they would see little shipping in the river until the sawmills got started. The mills — a half dozen or so between Orono and Hampden — employed hundreds of men. They depended on the arrival of the river drives from upstream, but they doubtlessly had some logs leftover from last year.
“Although the ice left the Penobscot river on Saturday, March 20, there is no prospect of much shipping until about the first of May, when the saw mills will start, and until then the open port will be chiefly useful to regular steamers and coal barges,” wrote the reporter.
Other springtime events besides river commerce captured the attention of local journalists. They included the first hike of the season for some Brewer Boy Scouts, who had a remarkably warm, dry walk through woods and fields on the Pushaw road, cooking their own meal on the way.
Faster means of transportation than hiking were also being contemplated. Most people kept their autos in their barns or garages, although some had the money to pay a commercial garage dealer for storage and maintenance over the winter. It was time to get these machines ready for the rough roads that were not as muddy this year as usual.
One wealthy young fellow, “the son of a prominent Bangor man,” had stored his new Ford on blocks in a family barn so the tires did not touch the floor. Then, with spring in the air, he got the bright idea to try it out. Starting it up and sliding it into gear, he sat up in the front seat and revved the engine until the vehicle vibrated and the speedometer clocked 40 mph standing still. Turning suddenly to try to get a look at the back wheels turning merrily, he jostled the vehicle off its supports. Hitting the floor, “the car made a wild dash for the side of the barn,” smashing through the wall into the barnyard. The boy escaped with bruises and the car needed repairs, but the barn looked like it had “a mild flirtation with a husky young Kansas cyclone,” reported a Bangor Daily News reporter on April 1.
That same day back on the river, at the salmon pools, anglers were setting records on the first day of fishing season. John L. Thomas of Rockland caught the first salmon at 5:40 a.m. He sold it to Gallaghers market for $2 a pound. Bangor Democrats, as a recent tradition dictated, shipped it to the White House where it was expected to be a delicacy on President Woodrow Wilson’s dinner table a day or two after.
Other successful fishermen that day included Michael Flanagan, Karl Anderson, Fred H. Tuck and Frank Cowan, together making a record catch, according to the Bangor Daily Commercial on April 1.
While a blessing to hikers, drivers and fishermen, the dry weather was a problem for the working men on the river. Too little snow in the winter had slowed the hauling of logs to the rivers and streams. Now the lumbermen were complaining there was too little rain to help swell those same rivers and streams so the logs would ride smoothly down to the mills.
A Commercial reporter went in search of lumbermen visiting Bangor to do some shopping to comment on the weather. Benjamin Willis of Topsfield had about 400,000 feet of logs to drive on the East Machias River. He told the reporter dry conditions would hold things up until the middle of the month.
Harry Karp of Washburn said he needed heavy rainfall to move four or five million feet of railroad ties. Fred Strout of Milo was in town to hire 30 men to cut cordwood, and hoped to start driving in 10 days if there was a good rainfall.
Meanwhile, “swarms of idle men” were hanging around the downtown, most of them waiting for work around the Exchange Street employment agencies, reported the Bangor Daily News on April 5. Forty-five penniless men had spent the night at the police station. Few, if any, were causing trouble and most were dressed like workmen, not hoboes. The latter could be arrested for vagrancy if they did any begging.
Five days later, the Commercial reported 35 or 40 men were sleeping in spaces otherwise known as “dungeons” meant for less than half that number. They were packed in like sardines without ventilation. Sleeping on cement floors, some covered themselves with newspapers and slept in their clothes trying to avoid the “vermin.” Their fare was cold water and pilot crackers, but “they are welcome to fill their pockets if they are hungry.”
Most of these men were just looking for enough to get by until they could get a job on the river drives. The situation had been much worse the previous spring when they were lined up and down Exchange Street waiting for handouts and sleeping space at the employment agencies. People living in nearby residential neighborhoods were afraid there might be a riot.
The event that seemed to bring “the coming of spring” to a glorious close each year was Easter Sunday, but 1915 was a bad year for the annual “parade of fashion,” which seemed to get as much attention as the church sermons.
The day commenced with “a howling blizzard” noted the Bangor Daily News on Monday. All the rest of the day the sky was streaked with leaded clouds and the wind was cold and raw enough for mid-winter.
“In these circumstances the usual fashion parade — and Bangor women can be as well dressed as any in New England, when they please — was out of the question,” wrote a reporter for the Bangor Daily News. “One observer in a fashionable east side congregation [that’s east of the Kenduskeag Stream] was heard to declare that she counted just three spring hats, and winter furs were everywhere more in evidence than finery.”
Lacking much fashion, the reporter was reduced to writing about the flowers in the chancel at All Souls, the special music at the Universalist Church, and “the usual great outpouring” at the Catholic churches.
All in all, it was a dreary opening to spring that year in Bangor with not enough rain in the woods and too much snow in the city on Easter morning and too many transient workers who didn’t benefit from either. But something like summer would soon be here.
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