Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
By 1770, there were just a few hundred families of European descent living in what is now Bangor. The handful of homes located in the settlement then known as Kadesquit consisted of log cabins clustered along the banks of the Penobscot River, west of the Kenduskeag Stream, that were quickly assembled by settlers eager to get sawmills operating.
It wasn’t until around 1775, however, that the first permanent house would be built by Thomas and Mary Howard, who were among the earliest settlers in Bangor. It was a simple home — a modest Cape Cod-style cottage — occupied by the Howard family for more than a century at the corner of what is now State and Howard streets. As the name suggests, Howard Street was named for them.
Another early Bangor house was built at 412 State St., a Gothic Revival mansion built around 1810, next door to the Howard house. That house was built by Joseph Carr, a prosperous Bangor lawyer, and was later purchased by Wilson Wing, whose daughters, Adeline and Caroline, lived together at the house for 89 years. They were renowned around Bangor for their arts patronage and for the ornate gardens they constructed on the property. After both died in the late 1960s, the daughters left their house to Eastern Maine General Hospital.
After around 120 years with the Howard family, the house at 424 State St. was purchased by the Thaxter family in 1891. In its 30 years of ownership, the family made extensive renovations and additions to the property — so much so that the original 1775 house was barely visible beneath it all.
The house sold three more times after 1921, first to Eastern Maine General Hospital, then to Charles Keene, owner of Keene’s Ice Cream in Bangor, and then in 1941 to Col. Sherman Shumway, who tore the entire house down and built a new one — unceremoniously demolishing a vital piece of Bangor history.
Alan Boone, a now-retired former physician at Eastern Maine Medical Center, has lived two houses down from 424 State St. since 1981, and in 1984 helped organize an effort to install a plaque commemorating the first permanent house in Bangor, which at that time was owned by Harold Robinson. In 2005, Robinson sold the house to Eastern Maine Healthcare, now known as Northern Light Health.
In 2007, the healthcare organization announced it planned to demolish the homes at both 424 and 412 State St. and turn the lots into employee parking. A public outcry ensued, noting that the 200-year-old Wing estate, famed for its beautiful gardens, was one of the best-preserved Gothic revival homes in the state, and that the site of the former Howard house held further historic significance as the earliest homestead in the city.
After close to two years of negotiations between the hospital, the city and supporters of preserving the historic structures and sites along State and Howard streets, the health care organization agreed to instead construct a parking garage across the street, on the hospital’s main campus. The organization sold 412 State St. to James Butler, a Bangor resident who owns a number of properties in both Bangor and Hampden.
Butler is notorious for his 2021 campaign for the Bangor City Council, during which it was revealed that he owed the city more than $80,000 in unpaid property taxes on six properties, including 424 State St. Butler has since paid those back taxes. The house at 424 State St. is presently in a state of disarray, with a sagging roof and overgrown weeds and bushes obscuring both the house and the historic plaque installed by neighbors in 1984.
The Wing estate was named a historic landmark by the Bangor City Council in 2008, and it still stands today — though the carefully cultivated gardens and landscaping were bulldozed to make way for more parking for the hospital. It’s still owned by Northern Light Health, which uses it as offices.
It’s not totally clear which is the oldest house still standing in Bangor. A farmhouse at 782 Pushaw Road, not far from the Glenburn town line, is believed to have been built around 1780, while 30 Kenduskeag Ave., known as the Smart-Daggett House, also is believed to have been built around 1780. Record-keeping from that era is sparse, so it’ll probably never truly be known which came first.
And all that’s left of what was truly the oldest house in Bangor — a structure built before Bangor was a city and the Declaration of Independence was signed — is the name of the street it was built on: Howard Street.
