The Eastern Maine State Fair in Maplewood Park (Bass Park today) was the apex of entertainment a century ago in Bangor. The Queen City of the East had many other popular diversions, from circuses to opera, but for attracting crowds — more than 10,000 people some days — nothing beat the Bangor fair.
Hotels set up cots in the hallways to handle the overflow crowds. The names of guests staying in the best hotels — the Bangor House, the Penobscot Exchange and the Windsor — were published in the newspapers even if they only moved in from East Eddington.
Department stores held sales with ridiculous bargains. Freese’s advertised free children’s dresses, shirt waists and hosiery. Palm Beach motor dust coats for stylish autoists were on sale for as little as $3.98.
Agriculture was still the fair’s main reason for being. But increasingly frivolous entertainment was taking over. The midway, which the newspapers said in 1915 was triple the size of past midways, was partly a celebration of new cultural and technological trends — a peek into the future.
In 1915, aeroplane daredevils were replacing balloon ascensionists. Motordrome performances terrified viewers.
Dive tanks featured pretty girls in bathing suits who were skilled swimmers. Two “enormous” Ferris wheels gave riders new views of the city.
Just seeing all the autos people had come in entertained many folks. Hundreds of people were arriving in “machines” instead of on the electric trolley or steam trains.
“Never was there such a showing in Eastern Maine,” enthused a reporter for the Bangor Daily News on Aug. 27. At one point, as many as 1,000 “motors” were parked around the horse track and next to the judges’ stand.
Fairs used to close at dark, but now electric lights made it possible to extend activities far into the night.
A fireworks show in 1915 attempted to simulate the look and sound of one of the great battles occurring in faraway Europe — “the destruction of the great forts of Liege, Belgium.”
A cabaret with dancing to the music of the Bangor Band and a “confetti night” were scheduled for the Bangor Auditorium.
Just four years ago much of the city’s downtown had been destroyed in a horrific fire. The fair was another chance to show folks from afar how much had been done to clean up and rebuild.
A building boom had been underway since the ashes cooled. Of special note were the new high school, the public library and the post office, which was almost completed, lined up along Harlow Street.
Many other impressive structures like the C. W. Morse building, which included the Bowlodrome and a public auditorium, the Windsor Hotel, the Graham building and the Central Building had gradually filled nearby vacant lots.
Many “pretentious” homes were being built to replace the mansions on French Street, Broadway and other residential thoroughfares leveled by the fire.
A general cleanup of the city had been going on as well. Among the major recent accomplishments was the removal of the “filthy dump” — the “city stable dump” consisting of “rubbish, refuse and street scrapings” — located on the west bank of the Kenduskeag Stream behind the city stable and the county jail, in plain view of the new high school and library across the stream on Harlow Street.
The aldermen had also decreed the removal once and for all of the “shack stores” that had sprouted like mushrooms after the fire enabling burned out businesses to stay open. They were supposed to have been removed within a year of the fire, but some remained as ugly reminders of the past.
In some cases, lunch cart operators, replacing the restaurants that had been destroyed, had moved into vacant lots, removed their wheels, and turned the wagons into permanent, but illegal wooden structures.
Finally, a few people needed to be cleaned out in preparation for the fair. The Bangor Daily News described the arrival of a gang of pickpockets including five or six men and “one woman who is the treasurer.” The police were ready for them.
A few days later, the police arrested eight tramps at Maplewood Park, jailing six of them.
“We are cleaning up a little before the fair,” said the police chief. “There has been an influx of bums into town and they might just as well get the idea … that Bangor is no playground for tramps.”
The police were also combing the railroad yards, and looking over some of the dives on Hancock Street for gambling machines, said the Bangor Daily Commercial on Aug. 21.
If anyone was doing anything about the dozens of saloons all around the Devil’s Half Acre and Pickering Square and in many hotels and restaurants, no mention was made.
The fair ran between Aug. 24 and Aug. 27. A new generation of celebrity show stoppers was modernizing the midway. Mention of a few of them gives an idea how entertainment was changing.
Professor C. C. Bonnette was planning his final balloon ascension after 20 years of performances at the Bangor fair. His act consisted of going up in a large balloon and jumping out in a parachute.
Bonnette’s assistant, Jack Murphy, stole the show that year, however, nearly killing himself in the process. In three separate landings run amok, he knocked the chimney off a house, he drifted six miles away into a farm field, and he landed in the Penobscot River.
Aeroplanes were still a thrill, if not a novelty, the first having soared over the fairgrounds in 1912. This year, a biplane navigated by daredevil stunt pilot J. Chauncey Redding circled the grounds.
“While opposite the grandstand and not more than 500 feet up, he made some swift and spectacular dips; and when at the end of 20 minutes he made a smooth landing at the southeast corner of the track enclosure, 500 automobile horns united in a series of approving honks,” reported the Bangor Daily News.
Like so many stunt pilots of the era, Redding was killed in a plane crash less than two months later in Lynn, Mass., according to Wikipedia.
Finally, we can report that the status of females along the midway had improved since the days when Fan Jones and Aunt Hat paraded young women in tent shows.
One fixture at the fair for the past few years had been a promoter referred to in the press as Diamond Lew Walker. He was known for his “tawdry dancing shows” and on occasion had been the object of investigation by the Christian Civic League of Maine.
This year, Walker had cleaned up his act. Instead of dancing girls, he had brought an all-girl diving act, featuring skilled swimmers in a portable tank. Meanwhile, his motordrome featured both male and female motorcyclists.
German-born Margaret Gast, champion motorcycle racer, was the hit of the season, getting her photograph at the top of the front page of the Bangor Daily News on August 28. You can still read about her and see her picture in Wikipedia.
“She literally flirts with death several times a day — and seems to enjoy it. … Her feat is to drive a high-powered machine at lightning speed on the almost perpendicular sides of the huge cup-shaped motordrome, adding some embellishments that make the spectators gasp and then marvel that she doesn’t break her neck,” observed a reporter for the BDN.
Formation of a local motorcycle club for women had recently been announced in the papers. Women still could not vote, but they were welcome to sample the latest thrills technology had to offer.
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