This Bangor Building Was Once The City’s Grand Hotel where Presidents Stayed

Aside from full-time residents and their families as well as building staff, hardly anyone has been inside the Bangor House at the corner of Main and Union streets in downtown Bangor for more than 40 years, ever since it was turned into apartments in the late 1970s. But in its heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Bangor House was one of the grandest hotels in Maine, with an ornate ballroom, a granite piazza, an elegant dining room, and even indoor plumbing — something truly novel for the 1830s. In the 19th century, Bangor was in its boom times as the lumber capital of the world, when ships would carry lumber harvested from Maine’s north woods to ports up and down the East Coast, to the Caribbean and even to the West Coast via Cape Horn. According to the Bangor House’s 1972 application to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the lumber barons who profited from the industry formed a company in 1833 with the goal of constructing a “public house” to rival the newly opened Tremont Hotel in Boston.