Bangoreans lamented the decline of their harbor as a lumber port a century ago. But anyone who owned a sailing vessel still was making plenty of money.
World War I had created a shortage of maritime “bottoms” internationally long before the United States entered the war. While many folks were bemoaning the death of the Queen City’s harbor and the city’s inability to attract a large factory or mill, a few were making plenty of money from their investments in out-of-date wooden sailing ships, according to the papers.
BANGOR VESSELS REAPING HARVEST IN OCEAN TRADE, a headline in the Bangor Daily Commercial said on March 4, 1916. The reporter’s main source was Horace A.Stone, who was said to own interests in more ships than any other man in Bangor. The son of a Bangor sea captain, he even had a schooner named after him, the Horace A. Stone, a four master launched in Brewer in 1903.
“Scores of vessels owned or built in Bangor are realizing enormous profits from coal and lumber traffic as well as miscellaneous lines such as transportation of Medford rum to West Africa,” the Bangor Daily Commercial’s reporter wrote.
The schooner Samuel W. Hathaway, which was built in Brewer in 1902, had recently carried 200,000 gallons of rum to the West African coast along with flour and some lumber. The profit for the voyage was $28,000, more than the vessel was worth prior to the war.
Before the war, the coal rates from Newport News, Virginia, and other ports in that vicinity to Stockton, Maine, where the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad has established a port a few years ago, was from 70 to 80 cents a ton. Those rates had climbed to from $3 to $3.25 a ton.
The demand for carriers of that sort was so great that it was impossible to contract ahead of time for coal to come to Bangor “after the ice goes out” of the Penobscot.
Stone predicted that the coming season would see more ships built in Maine than at any time during the past 10 years. He could recall the time when every seaport had one or two vessels being built each year, but nothing like that had been seen in many years.
He stopped short of predicting a return to shipbuilding in the Bangor area, however. “The ocean carriers of the future are to be of iron and steel, he said, and although a few wooden craft may be built now, there’ll be no general return to sailing vessels … The era of sail and wooden ships has been permanently succeeded by that of steam and sail.”
There was money to be made investing in shipping. “Those residents of Bangor who do own [an interest] in schooners are pretty well pleased with their investments now, and Bangor probably has more people owning such class of stock than any other community of its size in northern New England,” Stone said.
Stone could recall a summer when 13 vessels were launched in Bangor harbor, and just a few years earlier three or four more were launched in a four-year period.
One of them was the four-mast Augustus H. Babcock, launched in 1904 from the Stetson boatyard on the Brewer side of the river before an audience of thousands. It was named for the president of Stickney and Babcock Coal Co., which depended on big vessels to get its product to Bangor.
Using the Babcock as an example, the Bangor Daily News picked up where the Bangor Daily Commercial left off in a story on April 13, 1916, explaining how “any kind of vessel fit to go to sea is more to be prized these days than a gold mine or even a bottomless well of gasoline.”
The Babcock was “bringing fertilizer from Vela de Coro, Venezuela, to Jacksonville [Florida] at $5.25 a ton; due at Jacksonville any day now, chartered from there to Boston with standard ties at 37 cents (they used to be glad to get 16 or 18), and — here’s where the real gold mine comes in — engaged to take general cargo from Boston to the Gold Coast of Africa at $80,000 lump sum, of which $60,000 is to be paid when bills of lading are signed and before the vessel casts off from the loading berth,” the newspaper reported. The vessel had cost only $77,000 to build.
The reporter offered other examples of such profitable deals then underway. The four-master Governor Powers, which sailed April 11 from Norfolk, Virginia, for Pernambuco, Brazil, was getting $19 a ton on coal, and the four-master Horace A. Stone, then discharging lumber at Boston from Orange, Texas, would get away the following week chartered for the Norfolk-Pernambuco voyage at the same price.
“Coastwise freights also are taking a big boost,” the reporter wrote. “It is likely that the lumber carrying from Bangor and other eastern Maine ports this season will be done on a basis not lower than $5 per M to New York.”
I quote these obscure geographical references and commercial jargon as examples of what the average newspaper reader was expected to know a century ago. Bangor still was a seafaring town, even if its harbor was almost empty much of the time.
A shipbuilding boom, including wooden sailing ships, was already underway thanks to the war, but not for long. Stone named a few local places where ships were being built that summer — a 1,200- ton craft at Milbridge, an 1,800-ton vessel at Rockland and others at Phippsburg, Bath and Gardiner.
A story in the Bangor Daily Commercial on March 30 outlined other major ship construction in Bath and Camden, where R.L. Bean had an $800,000 contract to build six four-masters, and “work is assured for more than three years.”
The resurgence of shipbuilding in the Bangor area would occur briefly. In 1918 and 1919, three schooners were launched, one each in Brewer, Orrington and Bangor. They were among the 100 or so wooden, three- and four-mast vessels built along the Maine coast between 1914 and 1920, according to Maine maritime historian Roger F. Duncan.
A few such vessels operated profitably up until World War II, according to Duncan, but many dropped out of existence, long forgotten, as the years passed.
One of those that faded away ignominiously was the Horace A. Stone. I found a brief wire story on the Internet published on March 18, 1935, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, explaining the fate of the Stone and two other Maine-built vessels, the four-master Augusta W. Snow, launched in Brewer in 1905 and the five-master Jennie Flood Kreger, launched in Belfast in 1919.
The three schooners had been anchored off mud flats in East Boston for several years. The Stone had operated as “a floating dance hall” for a time.
The next day the three vessels, or what was left of them after a fire had burned the Stone and the Kreger “fore and aft” killing the watchman and his cat, were scheduled to be broken up into firewood by “100 emergency relief administration workers.”
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