Bangor Fire, The

DESCRIPTION: "It was on a Sunday afternoon, The sky was bright and clear, The people... felt no dread or fear." But a fire starts on Broad Street, and much of the town of Bangor burns. The song catalogs buildings destroyed. It praises mayor, firefighters, and God
AUTHOR: Words: John J. Friend
EARLIEST DATE: 1916 (Gray-SongsAndBalladsOfTheMaineLumberjacks)
KEYWORDS: fire
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
April 30, 1911 - The Bangor Fire
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Gray-SongsAndBalladsOfTheMaineLumberjacks, pp. 176-179, "The Bangor Fire" (1 text)
NOTES [275 words]: For such a dramatic event, the Bangor Fire is very little mentioned in histories. Not one of the printed references I checked had any data. There is a short article in Wikipedia noting that only two people were killed, but that nearly 300 homes and 100 business were destroyed, along with most of the town's civic buildings. Damage was estimated at over three million 1911 dollars.
There is a book by Wayne E. Reilly, Remembering Bangor: The Queen City Before the Great Fire, History Press, 2009. It's not really about the fire; it is a series of newspaper accounts, printed in the early 2000s, describing the town as it was before the fire (and based on items in Bangor's newspapers in the pre-fire area). It says of Bangor in 1911 that "the city was in transition between its glory days as the lumber capitol of the world and its more prosaic status as the major service center for that vast, ill-defined area called Eastern Maine" (Reilly, p. 9).
One wonders a little about Bangor's fire code. The fire supposedly started in a hay shed owned by one J. Frank Green (Reilly, p. 123). But Green's sheds had already been the site of two fires in 1907-1908 (Reilly, p. 120). The first one was minor, but the second one, thought to be of "incendiary origin," had taken out several buildings and did between $15,000 and $20,000 in damage (Reilly, pp. 120-122). Yet Green was allowed to continue using his shed (Reilly, p. 121, has what appears to be a photo of the shed after the 1908 fire).
This poem, which is accurate as far as I can tell, really does sound like the recital of an eyewitness, although there is no evidence it went into tradition. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.7
File: Gray176

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