The head of navigation on the Kennebec River has attracted the interest of human beings for thousands of years. European settlers were known to have explored here as early as 1607 and a trading post was operating by 1628. The first permanent settlement did not occur, however, until 1754 when a supply base known as Fort Western (named for an English friend of the colonial governor) was established by James Howard in the employ of a Boston land company called the Kennebec Proprietors.
Development took place on the slopes of both banks of the Kennebec River; to the east the section that included Fort Western was called Hallowell and a second settlement was known as the Hook and then Harrington. The two villages jostled a bit for pride but came together after a bridge was built near Winthrop Street in 1797. The origins of the name Augusta are a bit murky but the best guesses trace it to a woman named Pamela Augusta Dearborn who was the daughter of a Maine veteran of the American Revolution and a representative to the Continental Congress from the Kennebec District, General Henry Dearborn.
Lumber powered the Augusta economy during its days as part of Massachusetts, so much so that Continental soldiers were paid in pine boards for their service in the Revolution. After Maine entered the Union as the 23rd state in 1820 Portland was the state capital. But the legislature began meeting at the more centrally located Augusta in 1827 and the government moved in for good in 1832. An amendment to the Maine Constitution in 1909 ended any grumblings about capital relocation by affirming Augusta as the capital city forever.
Unlike many small American capital cities Augusta did not become a government town. The Kennebec River was dammed and its water power supported 11 lumber mills, a cotton factory and grist mills. A United States Arsenal was built in 1827 and the state hospital founded in the 1830s. In the winter tons of ice was harvested from the river to bolster a thriving ice industry. By the end of the 19th century there were paper mills and a boom in magazine publishers. Millions of Americans knew the town of Augusta as the postmark where their folksy home and garden magazines were produced.
As if to stay out of the way from Augusta commerce the government section is located several blocks south of the downtown core that is centered on Water Street. Augusta has endured its share of floods and fires but none so damaging as “the most destructive fire that ever occurred in Maine,” as the New York Times called it, on Sunday, September 17, 1865. The fire broke out in a new building on Water Street, to which its occupant had moved in only the previous day, and burned out the entire business district.
Most of today’s Water Street still teems with buildings erected in the aftermath of the Great 1865 Fire, stone and brick structures sporting the Italianate ornamentation that was so prevalent in America at mid-19th century. This is where our explorations will concentrate but first we will begin across the river where Augusta began more than 250 years ago...
If anyone could ever wax poetic, it was Henry David Thoreau. Here is what the legendary wordsmith jotted down on one of his not infrequent visits to Bangor in the mid-1800s: “There stands the city of Bangor, fifty miles up the Penobscot, at the head of navigation for vessels of the largest class, the principal lumber depot on this continent, with a population of twelve thousand, like a star on the edge of night, still hewing at the forests of which it is built, already overflowing with the luxuries and refinement of Europe, and sending its vessels to Spain, to England, and the West Indies for its groceries.”
New England never experienced too many boomtowns but Bangor was one. Sitting at the head of navigation on the Penobscot River (explorer Samuel de Champlain had called the river “handsome and agreeable” when he poked around the Maine coast in 1604) and possessing a natural harbor deep enough to comfortably handle oceangoing ships, Bangor was ideally situated to exploit the vast white pine forests that stretched unbroken between the town and Canada. The first sawmill was set up when the place was still called Kenduskeag Plantation in 1772. The name Bangor would come - so the most popular story goes - two decades later when the Reverend Seth Noble was sent to the Massachusetts General Court to incorporate the name “Sunbury.” But the good parson could not get his favorite Welsh ditty “Bangor” out of his head and blurted the hymn name out at the moment of truth.
A few decades down the line Bangor was incorporated as a city in 1834 and there were more than 300 sawmills humming. Bridges weren’t necessary to cross the Penobscot, you could just hop across on the traffic jam of logs. Bangor held the undisputed championship belt of “Lumber Capital of the World” and would continue to do so until the network of railroads opened up the hardwood forests of Central Pennsylvania and the Upper Great Lakes and the Pacific Northwest in the 1880s.
The lumber barons used their profits on opulent mansions and there was plenty of money for impressive civic projects. In many ways the Bangor streetscape could easily be mistaken for a city many times its size. Architects from Boston and New York City were regular arrivals in town. And then came April 30, 1911. Hay bales caught fire in a dockside warehouse and before the flames could be extinguished half of the city’s 100 downtown blocks had perished. It was the last major fire in Maine’s history and considered to be the last massive urban fire in the United States. Luckily, only two people died.
But Bangor shook off the conflagration like so many snow flakes on the shoulder. Rebuilding was so rapid that the Bangor Daily News editorialized two years later, “Our crooked streets have been made straight; our narrow streets have been made wider; our busiest streets have been newly paved with more durable material; our streets have been fitted for automobile traffic, and most wonderful of all, towering business blocks of brick, iron and concrete have sprung up, seemingly like mushroom growths, along most of the former business thoroughfares, many of them being much larger and taller upon the very sites of former rattletrap structures.” Bangor suddenly possessed Maine’s first completely 20th century streetscape.
Maybe the recovery from destruction emboldened future generations in Bangor. The city was very aggressive with urban renewal projects later in that 20th century, much to its detriment. To explore how those streets look in yet another century we will begin our investigations at one building that has seen it all, a place where Thoreau would stay when he was marveling at the city...
Since permanent settlement began on this peninsula in Casco Bay the town has answered to many names: Casco, Falmouth and Portland among them. It has also put on many faces. There was a rebuilding of 75% of the town after British Captain Henry Mowatt cannonballed the lumber port to the ground in the early days of the Revolutionary War.
And there was the recovery from the Embargo Act of 1807 that closed the thriving port. The town of 8,000 people was barely staggering back on its economic feet when it was named the capital of the new state of Maine in 1820. The government sashayed out of town to safer inland quarters a dozen years later but Portlanders paid no mind. The largest fleet on the East Coast was anchored here and railroads were coming to link the commercial wharves to Canada and points West. Landfill created Commercial Street on the waterfront in the early 1850s and it rapidly filled with prosperous shipping and mercantile concerns.
And there was the Great Fire of 1866 that broke out on Independence Day, maybe from some careless handling of fireworks. More than 10,000 people were left homeless - it was the worst urban fire in American history to that point. It sounds bad but only two lives were lost and the city rebuilt with startling alacrity. Scores of brick buildings emerged in the downtown area, many of high Victorian style by talented architects. The Old Port remains a thick tapestry of brick commercial buildings to this day.
Portland became an active player in urban renewal in the 1960s. Several beloved landmarks were lost: the Falmouth Hotel that was the city’s leading guest house of the 19th century, the grand Richardsonian Romanesque-styled Union Station, the Grand Trunk Railroad Station, the old post office. Things were getting so out of hand that Greater Portland Landmarks was hastily started in 1964 to stem the tide.
We will set out to see what was saved from a small park on Congress Street, which transformed after the Great Fire from a residential to commercial showplace, stuffed with fine hotels and department stores which had the goods of the world on offer. Enough remains that the American Planning Association named Congress Street one of America’s Top 10 great streets in 2014...