The world’s 1st marketed chewing gum was made in a tiny Bangor storefront
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Of all of the issues that Mainers have invented or mass-marketed — earmuffs, the machine gun, the microwave oven — maybe none is as little acknowledged as chewing gum.
In any case, it was in 1850 that Hampden native John Bacon Curtis first acknowledged that spruce gum, a deal with derived from spruce tree sap and loved by each Wabanaki individuals and Maine lumbermen, might probably be a profitable product if he marketed it accurately.
At this time, manufacturers like Trident, Icebreakers, Orbit, Bubblicious and DoubleMint are discovered on grocery store cabinets everywhere in the world. However within the 1850s, Curtis traveled from city to city and metropolis to metropolis, introducing the general public to your complete idea of chewing gum — a Maine-made product that shortly caught on and made Curtis a fortune.
The concept of chewing gum reaches again hundreds of years. Neolithic Europeans reportedly chewed on birch bark tar, whereas the Historical Greeks chewed mastic gum, and the Mayans and Aztecs used chicle, a tropical tree gum, as each an adhesive and a chewing product.
Previous to the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous individuals, together with the Wabanaki in what’s now Maine and Maritime Canada, harvested the sap, or resin, from the broadly ample spruce timber and turned it right into a chewy, sticky substance that might seal the seams of canoes, safely cowl wounds and sores, and in addition served as a pleasurable factor to chew.
By the 18th century, European settlers had been effectively established in what’s now Maine, and the lumber trade had already begun to flourish, reaching its peak within the early a part of the nineteenth century. As loggers harvested the seemingly infinite provide of timber within the Maine woods, spruce resin was a pure byproduct. Having discovered from the Wabanaki the way to flip the sap into gum, spruce gum turned standard with lumbermen throughout the northern U.S. and Canada.
Curtis was 21 years previous in 1848 when he went to work within the woods, taking a job clearing timber and brush for roads in northern Maine. He picked up the behavior of chewing spruce gum from his fellow lumbermen and started to marvel if there could be a enterprise alternative to provide, bundle and market spruce gum to confectioners.
Curtis and his father teamed up and requested loggers they knew to gather spruce sap and promote it to them. Over a range in a storefront on Franklin Avenue in Bangor, in 1850 the daddy and son workforce cooked up their first batch of spruce gum, a comparatively easy course of that includes repeatedly heating and shaping spruce sap till it may be lower into small, chewable bites. Finally, they might add sugar to the combination to boost the astringent, piney taste of spruce.
The youthful Curtis started promoting his gum, dubbed the State of Maine Spruce Gum or Yankee Spruce Gum, to confectioners and pharmacies statewide and, finally, throughout New England. It was an enormous hit, and the elder Curtis frantically tried to maintain up with demand, requesting an increasing number of spruce sap from loggers, usually shopping for it by the ton.
The youthful Curtis expanded the enterprise to western states, doggedly going store-to-store in cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago to promote the chewy novelty to an increasing number of prospects. Spruce gum even started to make its approach abroad.
By 1858, demand had far outpaced the capability of the little Bangor storefront, and that yr the Curtis Firm relocated to Portland, opening a chewing gum manufacturing unit at 291 Fore St. The manufacturing unit — at present the location of Hub Furnishings — at its peak employed round 200 individuals, largely ladies, and manufactured each spruce gum and paraffin gum, constructed from the petroleum-derived paraffin wax. It produced gum till 1920, and lots of the strategies utilized in reducing and packaging the gum are nonetheless used at present.
Between 1850 and 1870 Curtis made a fortune on chewing gum, and invested his cash in various different industries, together with mining and ranching. By the 1870s, he and his spouse had been dwelling in a grand mansion in Portland, and frequently donated to charitable causes, together with the development of a library in his father’s hometown of Bradford.
Spruce gum was finally overtaken in reputation by chicle-based gum, which first turned commercially accessible within the U.S. within the 1870s, and which could possibly be simply flavored by issues like mint, licorice and fruit. By the Nineties, manufacturers like Wrigley’s, Chiclets and Black Jack had been by far the most well-liked gum varieties within the nation, and Maine-made spruce gum returned to being a distinct segment product, loved largely by locals with connections to the lumber trade.
Trendy chewing gum wouldn’t exist in the best way we all know it if an enterprising younger man from the Bangor space hadn’t provide you with the concept to provide and promote spruce gum — a byproduct of Maine’s lumber trade, and a chewy deal with loved by the Wabanaki for hundreds of years prior.
