How this historic residence impressed the identify for Bangor’s Howard Avenue
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By 1770, there have been only a few hundred households of European descent residing in what’s now Bangor. The handful of properties situated within the settlement then often known as Kadesquit consisted of log cabins clustered alongside the banks of the Penobscot River, west of the Kenduskeag Stream, that had been shortly assembled by settlers desperate to get sawmills working.
It wasn’t till round 1775, nevertheless, that the primary everlasting home could be constructed by Thomas and Mary Howard, who had been among the many earliest settlers in Bangor. It was a easy residence — a modest Cape Cod-style cottage — occupied by the Howard household for greater than a century on the nook of what’s now State and Howard streets. Because the identify suggests, Howard Avenue was named for them.
One other early Bangor home was constructed at 412 State St., a Gothic Revival mansion constructed round 1810, subsequent door to the Howard home. That home was constructed by Joseph Carr, a affluent Bangor lawyer, and was later bought by Wilson Wing, whose daughters, Adeline and Caroline, lived collectively on the home for 89 years. They had been famend round Bangor for his or her arts patronage and for the ornate gardens they constructed on the property. After each died within the late Nineteen Sixties, the daughters left their home to Jap Maine Normal Hospital.
After round 120 years with the Howard household, the home at 424 State St. was bought by the Thaxter household in 1891. In its 30 years of possession, the household made in depth renovations and additions to the property — a lot in order that the unique 1775 home was barely seen beneath all of it.
The home offered three extra occasions after 1921, first to Jap Maine Normal Hospital, then to Charles Keene, proprietor of Keene’s Ice Cream in Bangor, after which in 1941 to Col. Sherman Shumway, who tore the whole home down and constructed a brand new one — unceremoniously demolishing an important piece of Bangor historical past.
Alan Boone, a now-retired former doctor at Jap Maine Medical Heart, has lived two homes down from 424 State St. since 1981, and in 1984 helped arrange an effort to put in a plaque commemorating the primary everlasting home in Bangor, which at the moment was owned by Harold Robinson. In 2005, Robinson offered the home to Jap Maine Healthcare, now often known as Northern Gentle Well being.
In 2007, the healthcare group introduced it deliberate to demolish the properties at each 424 and 412 State St. and switch the tons into worker parking. A public outcry ensued, noting that the 200-year-old Wing property, famed for its stunning gardens, was one of many best-preserved Gothic revival properties within the state, and that the location of the previous Howard home held additional historic significance because the earliest homestead within the metropolis.
After shut to 2 years of negotiations between the hospital, the town and supporters of preserving the historic constructions and websites alongside State and Howard streets, the well being care group agreed to as a substitute assemble a parking storage throughout the road, on the hospital’s important campus. The group offered 412 State St. to James Butler, a Bangor resident who owns various properties in each Bangor and Hampden.
Butler is infamous for his 2021 marketing campaign for the Bangor Metropolis Council, throughout which it was revealed that he owed the town greater than $80,000 in unpaid property taxes on six properties, together with 424 State St. Butler has since paid these again taxes. The home at 424 State St. is presently in a state of disarray, with a sagging roof and overgrown weeds and bushes obscuring each the home and the historic plaque put in by neighbors in 1984.
The Wing property was named a historic landmark by the Bangor Metropolis Council in 2008, and it nonetheless stands at present — although the rigorously cultivated gardens and landscaping had been bulldozed to make manner for extra parking for the hospital. It’s nonetheless owned by Northern Gentle Well being, which makes use of it as places of work.
It’s not completely clear which is the oldest home nonetheless standing in Bangor. A farmhouse at 782 Pushaw Street, not removed from the Glenburn city line, is believed to have been constructed round 1780, whereas 30 Kenduskeag Ave., often known as the Good-Daggett Home, is also believed to have been constructed round 1780. Document-keeping from that period is sparse, so it’ll most likely by no means actually be recognized which got here first.
And all that’s left of what was actually the oldest home in Bangor — a construction constructed earlier than Bangor was a metropolis and the Declaration of Independence was signed — is the identify of the road it was constructed on: Howard Avenue.
