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It’s been there for so long that it’s hard to picture the Penobscot River without the familiar green railings and impressive steel girders of the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge spanning its waters between Bangor and Brewer.
But there are folks in the area who still refer to the Chamberlain as the “new bridge,” despite the fact that it opened 70 years ago this fall. At that time, it was the second non-railroad bridge to be built connecting the two cities — the first being the “old bridge,” the Penobscot River Bridge, which lies just north of the Chamberlain and has stood in one form or another since 1902.
The Chamberlain bridge aimed to solve a traffic problem in Bangor and Brewer that had been slowly building since cars became the dominant mode of transportation in Maine in the 1920s and ’30s. With one bridge handling all the traffic between the two cities, there was regularly gridlock on both sides of the river.
The push from Bangor civic leaders and state officials to build a second bridge began in the late 1940s, and culminated in September 1951 with the approval at the statewide ballot box of a $2.5 million bond to cover the cost.
Ground would not be broken on the new bridge until May 1953, though site prep on either side of the river began a few months earlier, including the widening of Wilson Street in Brewer, the removal of an old wharf on the Bangor side, and rerouting traffic under the bridge on Summer Street and on the approach to the new bridge on Union Street in Bangor. Prior to the selection of Union Street, engineers had hoped to construct it at Exchange Street, though that site proved to not be feasible.
During construction, workers discovered five Revolutionary War-era cannons buried in the mud in the river. The cannons came from the disastrous Penobscot Expedition in 1779, a naval battle in Penobscot Bay that saw 44 U.S. ships destroyed and 474 sailors killed, wounded or captured by the British. Several of the American ships sailed up the river to Bangor, though they were eventually overtaken and sunk by the British not far from where the bridge now stands. It was the worst U.S. naval defeat until Pearl Harbor in 1941.
In total, it took about 18 months for the Chamberlain bridge to be built. The cost was $2.5 million in 1954 — approximately $29.4 million in 2024 dollars, adjusted for inflation. By contrast with a somewhat similar contemporary bridge project, the estimated replacement cost of building the new Ticonic Bridge crossing the Kennebec River between Waterville and Winslow is $52.8 million, and will take more than three years to complete.
The Chamberlain was also set to be Bangor’s first toll bridge in nearly 50 years. The toll booth was set on the Brewer side of the bridge, and upon its opening, charged drivers 10 cents for the pleasure of driving across. The toll was levied to pay back the bond for the bridge, and was promised to be temporary, though the booth collected fees for nearly 18 more years and had more than recouped the money. When the toll was ended in September 1971, it was the last remaining toll bridge in Maine.
At its grand opening celebration, held on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 1954, thousands of people lined both sides of the river to watch the ceremony and to be one of the first to cross the bridge. At the time, it was heralded as a game-changer for Bangor and Brewer that would tie the city’s fortunes even closer together. One thing the bridge didn’t have, however, was a name.
For the first five years of its existence, the bridge was not named for Chamberlain, Brewer’s Civil War icon and hero of the Battle of Gettysburg. In fact, it had no name, other than the colloquial “Bangor-Brewer bridge.” That didn’t change until Bangor state Sen. Allan Woodcock introduced a bill in the legislature in 1958 that would see it named for Chamberlain. It quickly passed both houses, and was officially renamed in a ceremony on the 5-year anniversary of its opening in November 1959, with several of Chamberlain’s descendants in attendance.
Seven decades after it was finished, and 65 years after it was named after a local war hero, the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge is now one of three bridges that cross the river between Bangor and Brewer, with the addition of the Veterans Remembrance Bridge in 1986, which carries Interstate 395 between the two cities. And even though it’s far from “new,” it’s still the “new bridge” to those who remember when it first opened.
