There was nothing quite like the arrival of the ice on the Penobscot River each winter to spark excitement in Bangor. Travelers rearranged their schedules. Sportsmen dreamed about racing their horses up by the dam. Children and adults pondered where to clear some snow for a skating rink. Men made bets on the exact date the harbor would close.
Most importantly, however, the icing up of the river changed the area’s economy, affecting employment for hundreds, from stevedores and mariners to ice cutters and sawmill workers. Everyone adapted, even if it was just finding a different way to get to work because the Bon Ton Ferry stopped crossing the river.
The newspaper reports about the coming of the ice a century ago started in the Bangor Daily Commercial on Dec. 13, 1915. The river was almost frozen over but not quite.
“If it were not for the Boston steamers and the tugboats of the Ross Towing Co. the Commercial could announce … the closing of the river, for these craft are keeping the river in a navigable state only by breaking up the ice as soon as it forms,” the reporter assigned to cover the grand event wrote. The temperature was down in the teens and low 20s.
Several vessels may not make it to port in time to avoid the ice. They included the Lizzie Griffin, which carried the Grand Banks fisherman who supplied fish to Alfred Jones’ Sons. It might have to discharge its load of herring at Bucksport when it arrived in several weeks.
Barges full of coal were due for Bacon & Robinson Co. and the Maine Central Railroad. Another barge, loaded with oil for Standard Oil Co., was due soon as well. The barge Boyleston with a load of fertilizer for the Henry McLaughlin Co. had been brought up the river yesterday by the Tug Walter Ross, breaking up ice both coming and going, keeping things open for a while longer.
Meanwhile, the little Bon Ton Ferry bravely continued chugging back and forth between Bangor and Brewer — along where the Chamberlain Bridge sits today — breaking up the ice that tried to block its way.
Such details were read with consuming interest in all the towns north and south of Bangor as the countdown continued. One morning soon people would awaken to find they could walk across the river.
A few days later, on Christmas Eve, the Commercial explored the possibility of a coal shortage. A local coal executive said there might be a shortage of soft coal for steam engines. The supply of hard coal was probably adequate. If it had to be used as a substitute for soft coal, however, coal shipments would have to be made to Bucksport, where the river was expected to remain open.
Meanwhile, it had started to rain. The Commercial announced the rain would cause a delay in ice harvesting, a local business that still employed dozens of men. The ice dealers — John F. Woodman & Co., Getchell Bros. and Citizens’ Ice Co. — had sold most of their stock from last year and were anxious to get going on next year’s supply.
The countdown continued. It was unusual for a Boston boat — one of the big steamboats that traveled between Bangor and Boston — to still be in the Queen City on Christmas Day, yet these huge vessels were still coming up and down the river without opposition from ice.
“At this time of year, however, it is not safe to make predictions regarding the river for more than 24 hours ahead. A rigid snap can close the port pretty quick,” the reporter wrote.
On Dec. 27, a terrific rain storm hit, further dampening hopes for the ice cutters and the skaters. Phone and telegraph lines went down.
During the night, Bangor was “completely out of communication with Portland” briefly. Western Union announced that morning that “not a single wire was in operation in any direction.”
The most spectacular effect of this storm was the “green lightning.” People living along the trolley line between Veazie and Bangor reported seeing “an arc” of “green fireworks” 20 feet in the air after the wind blew the wires together over the track. One wire continued to do all the work keeping the cars moving, and everything was repaired by midnight.
With signs of biblical proportions such as these, the day of reckoning approached. It arrived on Dec. 31.
“PORT IS CLOSED,” the multitiered headline in the Commercial announced. “Penobscot Froze Over Friday Stopping Navigation….DEC. 31 IS VERY LATE….Very Few Times in Past 100 Years Has River Closed So Near New Year’s.”
The river had frozen over from High Head to the dam “in one solid sheet an inch or more thick.” Temperature on Thursday had dropped to 6 degrees; on Friday, it had gone two degrees lower.
The tugboats were nowhere to be seen. The Boston boat Belfast was gone, too. It had made its last Bangor run. It would still be coming as far as Winterport for a while.
The little Bon Ton Ferry tried to keep going, valiantly making a couple of trips across the river Friday morning, but it was a losing battle. It already lost one of its propeller blades to the ice during a previous cold snap earlier in the month.
Ferry service was over for a while. Men could walk across the river or go by way of the Toll Bridge — which no longer charged a toll — but that was quite a walk.
Careful statistics were kept. The average date for closing was Dec. 10. But this late freeze had failed to break the record set on Jan. 9, 1831, and again in 1890, the newspaper reported.
On New Year’s Day, Harbormaster Edwin Lord had his say in a story summarizing his annual end-of-year report in the Bangor Daily News. The statistics on river traffic, alarming to some, had become an occasion for old timers to reminisce about the good old days when Bangor Harbor was still an important port — or at least a more exciting place to sit on a wharf and watch the sails go by.
So far as tonnage was concerned, there had been no great decline in Bangor’s overall water commerce in recent years, but there had been “a tremendous shrinkage” in the number of sailing vessels arriving. Thirty years ago, the arrival of sailing vessels numbered anywhere from 609 to 1,100 annually, including many square riggers. This year, only 253 sailing vessels had come up the river to Bangor, and not a square rigger in the bunch.
“Bangor’s foreign trade long ago all but vanished,” the reporter said.
The only foreign import noted was salt for J. N. Towle & Co., while there were no exports at all. The remnants of the shook and spool wood trade, both products of Maine’s forests bound for Europe, now went by train to the harbor at Stockton where the B&A Railroad had established its own port, bypassing Bangor.
The decline in the lumber trade stung the worst for those who remembered the days when Bangor was considered “the lumber capital of the world.” That designation, of course, had moved west long ago.
“As for the domestic lumber trade, the survey of Bangor has fallen from 246 million in 1872 to about 100 million feet last year,” the reporter noted without comment.
A look at the list of Bangor’s domestic imports was not encouraging either. At the top were coal, oil and gasoline indicating the area’s growing addiction to faraway fuel sources.
Lumber and pulpwood were not far down the list, a humiliating development for a place that specialized in both. A little further down were corn, granite, gravel and a few other items that illustrate the “global economy” was well underway even then, and Bangor was having trouble competing.
Of course, bemoaning such details ignored the fact that Bangor was evolving — had evolved already — into eastern Maine’s wholesale and retail shopping center, while new paper mills and railroad transportation had boosted the economy in ways that also benefited the Queen City.
Logs remained a major business even if moving them and using them had changed. The population was on the rise, and immigrants still flocked to the Queen City looking for jobs.
Meanwhile, the skating was good early in the new year.
“On Sunday large numbers of men, women, boys and girls were skating on the river, on Kenduskeag Stream above Morse & Co.’s mill dams and at the old favorite muck hole, where generation after generation has disported itself on the ice in winter and waded in the muddy water in summer,” the Bangor Daily News reported Jan. 10.
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.