It’s one thing to see Hannibal Hamlin’s bronze in downtown Bangor, but true vice presidential enthusiasts can’t leave it at that. The 15th Vice President of the United States also happens to repose in Bangor, along with a number of other Hamlins, at Mount Hope Cemetery.
He’s in the company of a lot of other Mainers, too.
Including a lot of 19th-century Maine politicos and nabobs, and silent screen actor Ralph Sipperly. Of course I had to look him up, even though I didn’t see his stone.
Wiki notes, ultimately citing the NYT for the theater anecdote: “Ralph Sipperly [d. 1928] was a comic and character actor who appeared in ten films (mostly silents) between 1923 and 1927. His most notable portrayal was as the barber in the Academy Award-winning film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).
“During one theatrical performance of Six-Cylinder Love in New York in 1921, Sipperly, who played a high-powered car salesman, accidentally drove an actual automobile off the stage and into the first row of seats. No one was injured, though screams erupted in the sold-out hall, and one woman ‘became hysterical’ as people scrambled out of the way. The incident made The New York Times the following day, but apparently had no effect on Sipperly’s career.”
Mount Hope is credited with being the second U.S. cemetery of the rural cemetery movement. The cemetery organizers picked a partly wooded bluff whose slope rolls down to the Penobscot River. The first such rural cemetery was, of course, Mount Auburn in Massachusetts, which opened in 1831.
“At Mount Auburn, a large tract of land was converted into a romantic park with ponds, bowers, grottos, and a great variety of planting. It was consciously designed for the living as well as the dead,” the cemetery web site says.
“The City of Bangor was not long in following suit. Bangor became very much alive with the settlement of the Penobscot River Valley in the years preceding the Revolutionary War. In 1834, Bangor was declared a city. Among the citizens of Bangor came a strong sentiment for the creation of a new cemetery grounds for the burial of its dead.”
The new cemetery was opened in 1834, along the aesthetic lines pioneered in Boston. Climb the slope – I’ll admit, I drove on the road that snakes up that way – and you’re rewarded with a vista peppered with memorials.
Views of the river and the road that parallels it for a while, the epic US 2.
The cemetery extends further inland, all together totaling about 300 acres.
Aged and crumbly stones in mix, as usual.
Not a lot of large memorials, but some.
More modest memorials.
Actually, that isn’t the only memorial for Harry Merrill (d. 1924).
You have to wonder what the decision-making process was like among Harry’s family. Maybe they couldn’t agree on a fitting memorial, and one group went with a ground plaque, the other with a plaque-on-boulder?
“If you’re taking pictures of buildings, you should take one of that building over there,” an old man said to me, pointing at a building partly obscured behind the curve of the street. I had been taking pictures of buildings. A spring day had come to Bangor: the air was a pleasure, so was the friendly warm sun, and I was out and about among the short downtown blocks.
“Thanks,” I said, adjusting my position on the sizable downtown plaza, so that the building came into view.
Wow. As I often do, I looked into the building later. A little gem of the brick arts known as the Circular Brick Building, a no-nonsense Maine sort of name, or the Merchants National Bank building, after a long-time occupant. Part built in the 1900s, part in the 1920s, a bank till the 1980s, a mix of apartments and ground-floor retail since the 2010s, after some decades vacant.
A random old man’s recommendation was a winner. He was idling on a bench in the plaza, so I went back and told him I agreed that it was an impressive building. The man could have been from central casting: Get me an old Mainer in ordinary but not shabby clothes, and don’t forget the bushy white beard and pale pink face. It was a missed opportunity when I asked him whether he’d lived in Bangor his whole life. The comic Mainer answer would have been, “Not yet.”
Instead the old Mainer told me he had. Wouldn’t live anywhere else. Couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Didn’t want to go anywhere else. He implied he’d had enough of that during his time in the Army, exact years unspecified, and I didn’t ask when, though there’s a distinct chance a shooting war was going on then. That doesn’t mean he was anywhere near it, however. For all I know, he could have been a PFC excrement sanitation specialist (PFC-ESS) in Louisiana, to put it in the way the cinematic Patton didn’t, but the ’60s Army might have.
Anyway, he asked me where I was from, and long experience has taught me to say “Chicago,” and not something in any detail like, “Texas, but I haven’t lived there in a long time, and then I lived some other places like Nashville and Osaka, yes, the place in Japan, but it’s been Chicago for a long time now, except I actually live in the northwest suburbs.” Few people would hear any of that. Everyone pays attention when I’ve said Chicago (or Texas, the times I’ve said that). Somewhere years ago, I think it was a pudgy middle-aged Briton – you know, he looked a little like Benny Hill – who asked me where I was from. At hearing “Chicago,” he pantomimed shooting a Tommy gun.
When old man Mainer heard Chicago, he told me that soon after his discharge from the Army, he found himself in Chicago, in fact at the lakefront. He threw his Army ID into Lake Michigan. “Felt great to be out, but it was a problem, since that was the only ID I had right then,” he said. Obviously he made it back to Bangor.
The city’s got some fine streetscapes.
Some other handsome Bangor blocks and buildings.
Early examples of the art of the steel-framed highrise.
Paul Bunyan isn’t the only mural subject. This one is bees.
Because Bangor is known for honey production? I had to check and probably not much, the sort of thing that gets lumped in with “other” in the ag census for Penobscot County. These bees are bees for the sake of being bees. (Try that three times fast.)
“Bangor Beautiful partnered with Bangor Greendrinks to create a large bee-themed mural in Downtown Bangor during the summer of 2023,” notes the nonprofit Bangor Beautiful.”The artist Matt Willey is the founder of The Good of The Hive, a global mural project with the goal of hand-painting 50,000 honey bees, the number in a healthy, thriving hive. He has painted bee murals all over the world, including at the Smithsonian.”
I knew I got out of bed for a reason today: to find out that there is an artist whose obsession is bee murals. More than 11,780 painted bees so far, according to the artist. Eccentricity of the first order, and I salute it.
You can’t call Bangor bustling, but I’ve seen plenty more vacant downtowns. Business details, former and existing.
Temple of the Feminine Devine, eh? Not to be confused with the Temple of the Devine Feminine, an outfit in Seattle. I could make a Life of Brian reference here, but if you know that reference, you’ve already thought of it.
The unofficial Maine flag, and variations.
That flag failed to become official in the last election in a ballot question. No one in Maine cares what I think, but I think it should be made official again, but without disestablishing the current flag. Co-official, you could say. Maine would be unique that way. Also, no fixed pattern beyond a single pine tree and a single star to the upper left. Let a loose a proliferation of lone pine flags begin.
Bangor as a whole hugs the Penobscot River, but downtown clings to the much smaller Kenduskeag Stream, a tributary of the Penobscot.
A small island in the stream is a park.
The park sports a cannon captured at Fort Toro, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 1898.
It so happened that Rep. Charles A. Boutelle was the chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs in the U.S. House at that moment, facilitating the war prize cannon’s permanent move to Bangor. Quite the career Boutelle had, per Wiki: “American seaman, shipmaster, naval officer, Civil War veteran, newspaper editor, publisher, conservative Republican politician, and nine-term Representative to the U.S. Congress from the 4th Congressional District of Maine.”
That’s not all. Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, Bangor favorite son, stands in bronze not far from the cannon.
“After Lincoln took office and even with the outbreak of the Civil War, however, Hamlin had almost no role in the administration, as was common for this period in history. Hamlin despised his new position as vice president. He missed being part of the political process and controlling patronage but felt it was his duty to serve. He also found presiding over the Senate boring and was frequently absent. Still, he was disappointed when the Republican Party dropped him from the ticket in 1864.” A curious, but all too familiar quirk of human psychology, that.
The “diplomat” on the plinth refers to his posting to Spain in the early 1880s, named to the job during the brevity of the Garfield administration.
The good people of Bangor, Maine, want a word with the wider world about how to pronounce the name of the city. Or rather, they want to sing!
I have to say I’ve been careless myself about how I say “Bangor” all these years, including during college, when it was the punchy part of a running joke. The thing is, I don’t remember the joke, or who told it – me, sometimes, I guess – or under what circumstance. Just that it sounded like a funny name, which we were probably mispronouncing. Funny especially when you’re chemically enhanced, as college students are known to be.
But even said soberly, and correctly, it sounds a little funny, as some words are. There’s a town in Wales of the same name, which I assume lent its name to the settlement in Maine, and if you dig deep enough into the Welch, it means “wattled enclosure.”
On April 17, I wrapped up my visit to Maine and headed back toward Massachusetts. By way of Bangor, of course. I had to go there, considering my vague recollections that put it on my personal map of the world.
At the very least, I had to see Bangor’s Paul Bunyan. One of a surprising number of such statues.
Bangor claims the folkloric-ad man-created lumberjack as its own, and why not? Once upon a time, Bangor was a lumber town to beat all. The 31-foot statue looks pretty good, considering it has enduring Maine weather since its erection in 1959 on Main St. a short distance from downtown. Bangorian civic pride won’t let it fall into disrepair, no doubt. A local artist, J. Normand Martin (d. 2021) designed it and a New York company, Messmoor & Damon, built the statue.
Messmoor & Damon has a remarkable story of its own. The company was best known for its animatronic dinosaurs.
“In 1924, the model-making company Messmore & Damon of New York unleashed their masterpiece: the Amphibious Dinosaurus Brontosaurus, a moving, breathing, roaring animatronic dinosaur, based on displays in the American Museum of Natural History,” wrote Chris Manias, a historian at King’s College London.
“This commercial company constructed a whole menagerie of prehistoric automata and sought to take advantage of the growing appeal of paleontology and prehistory. Messmore & Damon presented dinosaurs and prehistoric animals through ever-evolving displays and in a range of contexts, and these were seen by hundreds of thousands of people in the United States, Canada, and France. Their creations were designed to mix commercial spectacle, novel technology, and narratives of life’s development.”
And Messmore & Damon did, one should add, Paul Bunyanof Bangor, who is still seen by many passersby to this day, unlike Amphibious Dinosaurus Brontosaurus, as awe-inspiring as it must have been.
A more recent depiction of Paul in Bangor – a variation of the statue, in fact – is a downtown mural.
Another local artist, Annette Sohns-Dodd, completed the work in 2021, including the slogan. Note that Paul’s not carrying the tools of the lumbering trade, but he seems eager to do his modern job as a Bangor booster.
A month from now, Main St. in Bar Harbor is going to be a busy place, sidewalks thick with shoppers and walkers with their coffee and ice cream cones. People will gather at the well-trimmed Village Green. The park at the end of Main, Agamont Park, named for a storied 19th-century hotel on the site that burned down long ago, will be alive with the pleasant sounds of people on vacation, taking in the view of the harbor. Boats will ply the harbor. Lobsters will die en masse to make their appearance on the menus of Bar Harbor restaurants.
One place in town that will not be busy come high season, just as it wasn’t busy a month ago when I visited — and was the only living person there — is the Village Burying Ground, which is a minute’s walk from Main St., tucked away on a small slice of land between two churches, Bar Harbor Congregational and St. Saviour’s Episcopal.
“Established before 1790, this cemetery holds in many unmarked and unknown graves the remains of those courageous men and women pioneers on the frontier of Downeast Maine,” says a sign on site, put there by the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Association.
“Sea captains, fishermen, shipwrights and hotelmen, selectmen and legislators, their wives and children, and the occasional sailer [sic] dying far from home also rest here.”
One of those sea captains, Israel Higgins (d. 1823).
Capt. Higgins, son of Eden (later called Bar Harbor) founder Israel Higgins, was lost at sea. “Israel was considered a master mariner and served as an Eden selectman in 1802, 1803, and 1809,” notes the blog Adventures in Cemetery Hopping. “He was in command of the schooner Julia Ann (his son Seth was also aboard), thought to be the first ship built in Bar Harbor in 1809. Israel and Seth died at sea on March 29, 1823 about 25 miles south of Sandy Hook, N.J., which is about 600 miles south of Bar Harbor.”
Lived to be 89. In those older days, an old sea dog who liked to hang out in the technically illegal bars in Bangor and tell harrowing and probably exaggerated stories about his seafaring youth? One of those old sea dogs who didn’t discuss the old days much? Did he regard steamships as unworthy of real seamen, or take positive joy in hearing about progress in seafaring?
Stones two by two. Maybe not coupled in life, but they are now.
Many stones are on their way to disintegration, as usual with a cemetery that goes back this far.
Dark rectangular slate, as seen in a lot of New England, though no others in this cemetery that I noticed, except for a handful of lighter-colored rectangles.
A memorial to Union soldiers from Eden, erected in 1897, ordered from a catalog. Attributed to Cook & Watkins of Boston, memorial makers.
The village paid for most of it, though the public at large donated. Their efforts were probably pushed along by the idea that we’d better get around to this now, what with all the graybeard vets.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think this is canonical Popeye.
It is Maine Popeye. He’s a sailorman, after all, and has probably cracked open a few lobsters in his time. Or so we can imagine, free of ridiculous ideas about canon. Applying canon to Popeye only goes to show how silly the notion of pop culture canon is, but that’s a subject for another time. During the afternoon of April 16, I spent a few hours chilling in Bar Harbor, Maine, where I encountered the lobster eatin’ Popeye over a closed restaurant. Chilling had a literal component, too, since it was overcast and in the low- to mid-40s F.
Consider the lobster. Bar Harbor certainly does.
The standing lobster touts for an ice cream and coffee shop. It was open, unlike about two-thirds of the businesses on Main St. Ice cream wasn’t going to hit the spot that day, but the shop’s hot chocolate did.
Even Bar Harbor fire hydrants have that snappy lobster color, almost.
Near the water, a display of lobster trap buoys.
This structure is actually a few miles out of town, but I had to stop to look at the buoys.
As a resort town, Bar Harbor is only partly open in April. In some places on Main Street, workmen were getting stores ready for the summer.
At Cool as a Moose gift shop, note the leftover cardboard in the window. I’d have bought post cards there, just for the name, but it wasn’t open.
Streetviews.
The best thing about Main St. before high season is that parking is available and free. Municipal signs say that parking fees kick in on May 15 every year. By then, which is to say the day after tomorrow, I’ll bet parking isn’t much available any more either.
The harbor. Not very busy.
More detail.
Passersby have decided this is the place for stickers.
The Park Loop Road in Acadia NP is a fine drive (1) if there aren’t many other cars and (2) you take it easy around those curves. In that, it’s no different than a lot of rural roads. But there’s also the bonus of passing through thick Maine woods. There are brief views of the ocean from the road, but mostly you’re tooling through evergreens.
Through patches of deciduous trees as well.
Periodically, the road crosses under handsome bridges.
This made me wonder: bridges for what? Soon I learned that the park not only has a hard-surface road snaking through, but also a network of carriage trails. A lot of them. The bridges are for them.
“Forty-five miles of rustic carriage roads, the gift of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. and family, weave around the mountains and valleys of Acadia National Park,” says the NPS. “Rockefeller, a skilled horseman, wanted to travel on motor-free byways via horse and carriage into the heart of Mount Desert Island. His construction efforts from 1913 to 1940 resulted in roads with sweeping vistas and close-up views of the landscape.”
It was barely the season for the paved road, and I suspect few visitors were on the carriage roads either. I noticed that the entrance to the Wildwood Stables, a facility that supports carriage riding, and which can be glimpsed from the road, was still closed. A carriage ride through Arcadia NP might be an grand experience, but maybe not in April.
The woods alongside the road.
Driving is one thing, but I also wanted to walk. I found my way to Jordan Pond for that purpose.
“Oligotrophic lakes are most common in cold, sparsely developed regions that are underlain by crystalline igneous, granitic bedrock,” the entry says. “Due to their low algal production, these lakes consequently have very clear waters, with high drinking-water quality.”
I had my own drinking water as I walked the trails near the pond.
An easy trail. At one point, it crossed a creek feeding into the pond.
There were too many interesting tree roots to ignore them.
“Roots are typically at least half of a plant’s biomass, but you wouldn’t know it given how little scientific research has been devoted to these critical tendrils,” says the Smithsonian magazine. “Only recently have scientists given plant roots their day in the sun — in fields like collections research, climate science and microbiology.”
Or, in the case of the hardy trees of coastal Maine, their day in the fog.
We live on the crust of the Earth, and what do crusts do? Crumble. Especially when moving water has anything to do with it, as it does along the coast of Maine. Famously so.
I arrived at the crumbly coastline of Acadia National Park on the morning of April 16. The date is important for only one reason: Park Loop Road, the main scenic drive through the park, opens for the season every year on April 15.
Acadia NP occupies about half of Mount Desert Island and some other nearby peninsula acreage and small islands. The morning of the 16th broke damp and foggy and chilly. From my lodging in the sizable town of Ellsworth, Maine, which is on the mainland near Mount Desert Island, I made my way to the island, then Bar Harbor, then the entrance to Park Loop Road, stopping only for a wonderful breakfast sandwich at one of the few places along the way that was open, Farmstand Coffee House.
The visitors center at the park entrance wasn’t open either. The NPS missed making a sale of post cards to me. By the time I got to the park, the weather was better: slightly less damp and slightly less foggy and slightly less chilly.
Such is Maine in spring. I didn’t mind. In fact, the damp chill meant few other people had come that day. Chilly but no ice underfoot. I like to think that it all melted by April 15. Or maybe on April 15.
I sent a few pictures to Tom in Austin taken while I visiting Acadia NP.
He answered: “Wow. Fabulous. Choosing to visit that national park before May is a bold decision. Looks like you got good weather, though.”
Bold? Maybe. To boldly go where many vacationers have gone before. And will again, real soon.
I didn’t drive particularly fast along Park Loop Road. Little traffic for one thing, too much of a risk of a car-on-tree encounter for another thing, so curvy is it. Gnarly, you could say. The drive, whose construction John D. Rockefeller Jr. facilitated, winds but does not climb much as it follows the curves of the shore. The scenic stops are close to each other, since in national park terms, Acadia is a touch on the small side. Despite that it hardly lacks variety.
Beginning with the rocky shores you’d expect. The fog that day was a nice Maine touch. The foggy shores of Maine. There’s a song title for an AI song writing program: “The Foggy Shores of Maine.” Sad song about a solider dreaming of home on these shores? It worked for “Galveston.”
Boulders and sizable slabs, on their way to being pebbles and sand.
A feature that wears its name well: Thunder Hole.
A loud place, Thunder Hole, the waves bashing the rocks in crash-splashes, followed by the whistling, sucking whoosh as water pulls away from the rocks, followed by another bash against the rocks, all before you can count to three.
You can get closer to Thunder Hole behind the (relative) safety of rails, but that won’t keep you from a good drenching. Not that day, anyway. I kept my distance, and let the sound come to me in its noisy fury.
The park has a sand beach, called on the maps, Sand Beach.
I take that as an indication that most of the shore in these parts is topsy-turvy with boulders. I believe it.
Finally a warm Saturday. Finally a warm day of any position on the calendar. They’ve been spotty lately. Warned that the day would be warm, we went to Lilacia Park in Lombard early in the afternoon, something we do every few years in mid-May, for nearly 20 years now.
Most of the tulips were gone, but true to the park name, lilacs are in bloom in profusion. Not just colorful to see, but put your nose close for a fragrant moment.
Lilaicia Park is a crown jewel of suburban parks, and yet not overcrowded on a pleasant Saturday during peak lilac bloom. Just busy.
One of these years, some fool influencer or two might make Lilacia an It Spot, and the crowds will show up in ridiculous numbers. Or considering its location in the thick of the suburbs – the sort of place where influencers might grow up, but never consider interesting enough to point their cameras – that isn’t very likely? I couldn’t say.
Good to make it back. We met Kevin there this time around, at our suggestion, who came from the fairly close other western suburb of Downers Grove. He’d never heard of the park, and so I was glad to introduce him to it.
You can’t call it an obituary exactly, but not many people get a writeup like Eric R. Overlock, who died at 17 in Belfast, Maine, in 1999. The entire thing is worth a read, as are the two other entries on a Substack by one Matthew Hurley.
Eric Overlock was the toughest kid in Belfast, Maine. He was also the coolest. We grew up skateboarding. He was talented and sponsored in the ’90s when that was a big deal. His nickname was Big Poppa, like The Notorious BIG. He could fight, smoked cigarettes, and was dropping acid at 15…
I learned a lot from Eric, but it was from him I first learned that anyone, and eventually everyone, can and does die.
When I arrived in Belfast on April 15, a sign directed me to a public parking lot off Main Street. Next to the parking lot is the Eric J. Overlock Memorial Skatepark, marked by Eric’s plaque.
No one else was around, so I spent a leisurely few minutes documenting the skatepark at that moment in time. Like the Cadillac Ranch, I figure it changes according to the whims of Belfast graffitists.
Whatever the paint job, a world as strange to me as parallel bars or luge or the flying trapeze. How again does anyone learn it without serious bone breaks?
The skatepark and parking lot are on a long slope to the Passagassawakeag River. According to the Piscataquis Observer, “The Voice of Rural Maine,” it’s pronounced puh-SAG-uh-suh-WAH-keg. Which is just fun to say, once you get the gist. Wonder whether there’s a clipped version locally.
Main Street retail wasn’t quite closed for the winter, but mostly so for the chilly shoulder season. I expect the Moody Dog is gearing up for the summer season even now.
Main Street was very much worth a look anyway.
A handsome edifice at Main and High Streets. Maine seems to have, or had, a way with bricks.
As a settlement, Belfast is old enough to have been burned by British forces during the Revolution. Afterward, revivals and declines have come and gone, as industries cycle through the decades: shipbuilding, seafood processing, railroading, shoe making, poultry, credit card processing, shipbuilding again and tourism.
The Cooper Collection of US Railroad History
The building at the five-street intersection of Main, Church and Beaver Streets.
Details. Is Belfast a hotbed of anarchism?
But you can mock a two-faction system without being an anarchist. But note, back at the skatepark.
How about nanny-statism? I don’t know that you can plausibly accuse Maine of that, but still. A crosswalk example.
In case you were wondering.
What do you know, Maine was my first ever Belfast, not counting the HMS Belfast.
More of my idiosyncratic logic: Before last month, I’d been to Portland, Oregon, but I’d never been to Portland, Maine, and that would never do. I rectified the situation early on the afternoon of April 15 as I traversed Maine near the coast, partly on US 1. It was a short visit, so I focused on the historic downtown of Portland, known as the Old Port, even though I understand it still has elements of a working port.
Still, much of the Old Port is indeed old buildings, many handsomely repurposed in our time for one sort of retail or another. Wander around only a short time, and the overall impression is bricks. Everywhere bricks. Buildings of various sizes and shapes, made of bricks.
Even buildings of various vintages, made of bricks. Most are older buildings, or course, built one brick after another by masons themselves long gone. But their expert brickwork abides.
There are newer brick buildings too. At least, I think they’re newer — some of these buildings might be a combination of older structures with newer additions. It’s a little hard to tell. But anyway, more bricks.
Streets paved with bricks.
Sidewalks paved with bricks.
That one was a little tricky to walk. But I was paying attention.
Among the bricks and other hard surfaces, other details.
It was in Portland that I began to get a sense of the strength of Maine’s regional identity. Growing up in Texas, I know expressions of regional identity when I see them, and I saw a lot in Maine.
