Bangor is chockablock with historic buildings, some of which date back to its official founding as a city in 1834. And while each of those buildings has its own unique story, there are some with hidden histories that few are aware of — even those who may live within their walls. Here are three of those stories.
Colonial Apartments, 51-53 High St.
This multi-unit on High Street in Bangor doesn’t look particularly different from any other apartment building in the downtown area — but it’s actually a historically important example of a structure that helped revolutionize the way people in the city live.
Crowded, often unsafe tenement-style housing had existed in Bangor for decades, especially in neighborhoods including along Hancock Street on the east side, and on 1st and 2nd streets on the west side. In 1919, local architect Victor Hodgins designed the Colonial Apartments, which are believed to be the first purpose-built modern apartment building in Bangor. The building stood in stark contrast to most apartments at the time, which were by and large lower-income housing carved out of existing single-family homes.
The Colonial Apartments were designed as a “double triple-decker,” with two apartments side-by-side on three floors, each with its own entrance. It was marketed to middle-class people, and was populated by both office workers and, often, by single women or pairs of women, living on their own — still a new-fangled concept in the 1920s. The footprint of the building remains identical today.
Bangor Children’s Home, 218 Ohio St.
This 1860s building is usually overshadowed by its more famous next-door neighbor: the Thomas Hill Standpipe. Both structures certainly look as though they belong in a Stephen King novel. The Standpipe was already featured in “It,” but the children’s home could be its own entire book, with its imposing brick and granite construction, perched on a wooded hilltop overlooking the Kenduskeag Stream.
The Bangor Children’s Home was originally known as the Bangor Female Orphan Asylum, the first charitable organization in the city’s history, founded in the 1830s to house orphaned girls and young women in poverty. In 1866, the organization expanded to include boys, and the current building was constructed in 1869. The alternative for many of those children in that era was to live at Bangor’s Poor Farm at 629 Main St., or to live on the streets.
The building itself was constructed by prominent Boston architectural firm Hartwell and Richardson in the Stick style, a fusion of Gothic and Queen Anne architectural styles that featured many ornamental flourishes and things like Mansard roofs and dormers, all of which the building has.
In the 1970s, after more than 130 years as Bangor’s oldest charity, the Bangor Children’s Home closed, as traditional orphanages had largely disappeared at that point, in favor of the foster system and adoption. In 1975, it reopened as the Hilltop School, an early childhood education center, which still exists today.
Elmbank, 31 Kenduskeag Ave.
While this 1830s Greek Revival mansion at the corner of Kenduskeag Avenue and Division Street isn’t on the National Register of Historic Places as the previous two buildings are, its history is just as colorful. The house was originally built in 1835, but it wasn’t until it was purchased in 1868 by lumber baron Henry Prentiss that it was transformed into the epicenter of Bangor high society in the late 19th century.
Prentiss added a third floor to the house and built a Moorish revival gazebo in the front yard for entertaining, which, according to contemporary accounts, he certainly loved to do. According to the Feb. 20, 1873, edition of the Bangor Whig & Courier, the gathering held there for the annual Maine and New Brunswick Lumbermens Convention was full of “exhilarating music” to which the “stalwart sons of the St. Croix were threading the mazes with the fair daughters of the Penobscot.”
Prentiss died of a heart attack in July of that year. His wife, Sarah Prentiss, and later his son and grandson, carried on the entertaining tradition, hosting everything from garden parties to raise money for the Anti-Tuberculosis Society to theater companies doing outdoor performances of Shakespeare and plays like “Robin Hood” and “Alice in Wonderland.”
Deaths in the Prentiss family and the onset of the Great Depression effectively ended Elmbank’s nearly 50-year reign as the place to see and be seen in Bangor. In 1934, the property was sold to a local developer who turned it into a private mental hospital, which later became infamous locally as a provider of electroshock, or electroconvulsive, treatment. By the mid-1970s, the hospital had closed, and the building was converted into apartments.
