Sorting out the deserving from the undeserving poor was a major pastime a century ago, especially when it came to the penniless men who drifted into Bangor and many other cities claiming to be looking for work. In a city flush with money and jobs, which category you fit into often depended on the season of the year and the state of the economy.
Every spring, penniless men roamed the streets of Bangor. Some traveled long distances looking for work on the log drives. Others were trying to escape from the Queen City of the East after having spent all the money they made in the logging camps that winter on wine and women.
The newspapers invariably carried stories warning it was the beginning of tramp season, when men with no intention of working were arriving by rail from the West looking for handouts. These “knights of the road” were a common phenomenon, given the nation’s extensive rail system — about 70 trains entered the city each day during one recent summer — and the frequent ups and downs in the economy.
By early April, 1915, “swarms of idle men” were hanging around downtown Bangor. Many spent their time around the employment agencies on Exchange Street, which were still looking for a few good men to fill the last slots in the log driving crews heading upriver to bring down the winter’s harvest.
Each night a few dozen of the more desperate applied for shelter at the police station, a dismal excuse for a hotel where guests were directed to sleep on a cement floor and meals consisted of all the pilot crackers and cold water you could consume.
The newspapers duly noted, probably echoing comments of a favorite policeman, that these desperate castaways weren’t troublemakers. They were dressed like workmen and they didn’t smell of alcohol. They wanted jobs.
Of course there were cheap boarding houses and even a Salvation Army “workingmen’s hotel,” but these places charged money. One could get a place in one of the dives on Hancock Street for as little as 15 cents a night with two men to a bed and a shared bath down the hall.
But as a steady stream of newspaper stories made clear, the cheaper boarding houses were good places to get robbed by fellow boarders or by prostitutes. After a few drinks of the semi-poisonous liquor easily available from the dozens of nearby saloons, kitchen bars, pocket peddlers and the like, one was likely to wake up on the floor with a swollen jaw and empty pockets.
By mid-April, the police decided they had to do something about all the unintended guests. The numbers actually were increasing. One recent Friday night 59 men had been “taken care of.” The number dropped a bit to 43 on Saturday and back up to 57 on Sunday.
There were only 20 cells at the police station. “The corridors were filled, the men lying on the floor preferring a spot near the steam pipes although the night was warm. A barrel of ‘hard tack’ disappeared as by magic,” the Bangor Daily News reported April 12. Some of the sleepovers covered themselves with newspapers to keep away the vermin.
Saturday night’s guest list may have been lower because the proprietor of a well-known “resort” — a polite term for a house of ill repute — provided 25 “tickets for beds” at the Salvation Army workingmen’s hotel and sent them to the police station. Was it charity or perhaps an overdue protection payment?
The floor of the municipal courtroom also was strewn with cots that night. That may explain why two days later, on April 14, the newspaper reported Judge Benjamin Blanchard appeared before the city council to urge better treatment for these men, who, after all, were not of the hobo or “tough class” but who apparently were seeking honest work.
Judge Blanchard urged that the council put up some money to pay for food so the city could furnish at least “one good meal a day.” He said he personally “would solicit subscriptions” as well.
Chief of Police Thomas O’Donohue added that last year the police department had managed to furnish “the unfortunates” sausages, bread, coffee and soup. The issue was referred to the “committee on police” for discussion, where it seems to have disappeared.
Then everything changed. The newspaper stories took a decidedly different slant as the month progressed. All the log driving jobs were taken, and the last crews had headed up river. The labor crunch was over until next year. The lumber barons no longer were needy. The “unfortunates” were about to be reclassified as bums and kicked out of town unceremoniously.
On April 21, it was reported the county commissioners had decided to “take action this summer for an abatement of the tramp nuisance.” The plan was to charge hoboes with vagrancy, sentence them to jail for a few months and provide them with work to do, breaking up rocks with sledgehammers on a nearby rock pile. The idea was that when they heard about this innovation, “tramps will put Penobscot County on their blacklist.”
Judge Blanchard and Chief O’Donohue did a turnaround in a newspaper story on May 5. “Chief of Police O’Donohue, with Judge Blanchard co-operating, started a movement Tuesday morning for ridding the city of all tramps and hoboes who apply at the police station for shelter and who have previously been fed for a time at the expense of the city,” the newspaper reported.
“About forty rugged healthy looking specimens of humanity were lined up in the municipal courtroom after the regular business of the morning session had been finished yesterday and Judge Blanchard delivered a lecture which was straight to the point.”
Blanchard asked how many of them were looking for jobs. All hands rose. The judge and the chief looked about skeptically. Then the judge delivered the punch line: If any of them were arraigned as tramps — no money, no address, no job — he would sentence them to 10 months and 29 days. The county commissioners were ready to initiate “the rock breaking enterprise” too, the newspaper reporter added.
The next day, on May 6, five men were picked up at the train depot at Northern Maine Junction, a favorite hangout for tramps, and charged with evading train fares. They were part of the group driven out of the city by the Judge’s warning, claimed the police. Sentences were suspended, however, with the understanding the defendants would “get out of the city at once.”
A day later, on May 7, only one man applied for shelter at the police station. His fate was not recorded. The remainder of the “unfortunates” still hanging around had undoubtedly moved into “outlying barns,” suggested the reporter.
A few hoboes apparently had not gotten the word, however. On May 31, this item appeared: “In the municipal court Saturday, James McCoy of Portland was adjudged a vagabond and idle person and was sentenced to 90 days in jail unless he should get out of Bangor at once. He got.”
Anyone who came to Bangor had better have a few dollars in his pocket and a place to spend the night. Vagabonds were not welcome. The police station was no longer going to be used as a homeless shelter. But wait until fall, when unemployed men would be re-evaluated as fodder for the logging camps once again.
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.