Last week I introduced you all to Bangor’s Devil’s Half Acre. I have one more thing I would like to share with everyone and then I will move this blog along to some other topics. Seeing as it’s my blog … I guess I can do that! So if you are a history buff this works out great for you. If not, hang in there, I have other things planned once I get this Devil’s Half Acre all out of my system!

As a researcher I spend a lot of time online or in libraries pouring over little known tidbits of history. I love finding the stories that no one has talked about in hundreds of years. Over the course of my journey to write The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, I would say I was still researching right up until I sent that manuscript off to the Editor! It was very important to me that the book be as historically accurate as I could make it.

Researching, especially historical research, is some times more then reading old musty books. Often times history lives within the memories that we all have. I’m fascinated by oral family histories, the stories that were laughed and talked about around the dinner table or on cold winter evenings. These stories never, or maybe only rarely, make it into printed form. They are the markers of the personal lives of ordinary people and in my opinion are sometimes far more valuable then the histories recorded in what we would call historical books.

When I was gathering research on Bangor’s Devil’s Half Acre I was pretty certain I would not find anyone alive who could tell me first hand what it had been like living or working on Bangor’s waterfront over 150 years ago! What I was hoping for was someone that had heard the stories passed down through families and remembered them.

I found just that person in John. He attended a lecture I gave in 2008 at the Bangor Public Library. He approached me afterward and told me that his family had lived in the Half Acre and that he knew stories that he wanted to share with me. I set a date to meet with him the following week.

John was, at that time, a very elderly man. I wouldn’t dare make a guess at his age but he must have been close to 90 or more. He walked slightly bent over, his hands covered with brown age spots. If he talked to long he got those small globs of white saliva forming at the corners of his mouth. His glasses were bifocal so he moved his head up and down slightly until he could focus on what he wanted to look at. He had lost most of his hair, but what was left he had made a rather nice comb over protecting the top of his head. His hands would shake when he held the pictures and documents that he had brought to show me. Despite all of the physical signs of his aging his mind and his memory were sharp, probably sharper then mine! He was confident in his topic and he had the paper trail to back it up.

John’s grandparents, on both sides of his family, were Irish and had sold liquor in Bangor when it was illegal. They lived right in the heart of the Devil’s Half Acre on Union St. in between Summer & Broad Streets. This is a section of Union St. most of us can’t even imagine being a street with residential houses on it. If you are traveling north on Summer St., the on ramp to access the Joshua Chamberlain bridge now sweeps through what would have been John’s family home, the street itself lying hidden under fill and beneath the bridge. Their surnames were McCann and Gillohgly and I knew from my research that they were well know to the authorities in Bangor. To have found a living descendant of this family was exciting to me!

John and I spent the afternoon together, he speaking and I furiously scribbling on my yellow legal pad. First he laid out the genealogy so that I could understand who was who and how the characters all fit into the story he was about to unfold for me. Once I had that down he moved on and I began to see the lives of these people, immigrants, so desperately poor that illegal liquor sales was their only hope of survival.

He told me the story of his father, who as a young boy, crawled under the tables, where the men drank in the bars, waiting for them to start fighting. Once a fight was in full swing John’s father would grab up all the money that fell from they pockets as they battled with one another. John assures me it was a lucrative endeavor. He laughs as he tells the story of his aunt, who had a young man interested in her and he wanted to walk her home from school. To ashamed to let him know she lived in the Devil’s Half Acre, she had the boy walk her to the Isaac Farrar mansion further up Union St. and then told him she lived there.

John had brought pictures to show me as well, all of which I had never seen before in any published archives. These were personal family photos, not only of people but of the area. There were very few official pictures taken of the Devil’s Half Acre, given it’s infamous reputation, but what John shows me is full of a wealth of information. Of all the pictures he produces it is the last one that impresses me the most. Not so much the picture, but how John reacted to it. This picture is of a man, John’s grandfather, Thomas McCann. It’s an old photograph of an unsmiling man, typical to the time period. The man is dressed in a nice suit of dark clothes and across his chest he wears a sash. John makes a point of drawing my attention to this sash.

“That’s the sash of the Father Matthew’s Temperance Society.” he proudly said to me as he tapped on the picture with his index finger. I stop and look at him, I’m waiting for more, but it doesn’t appear he’s going to say anything else. So I venture forth with a question. “A Temperance Society?” I ask him. He looks admiringly at the picture again and says “Yes.” Again I wait but he’s clearly not going to add anything more. So I push a little harder. “Thomas McCann sold alcohol.” I said as if I needed to state the obvious hypocrisy that a man who sold alcohol for a living would be a member of a social justice group that denounced the sale and consumption of alcohol. “Yes, yes he did.” John replies staring again at the photo. “But he belonged to a Temperance Society?” I finally had to ask, stating the obvious so I could make sure I wasn’t missing anything. To this John just nods.

I know from my research that Thomas McCann was arrested dozens of times for illegally selling and serving alcohol. Yet here he is proudly wearing the sash of the great Irish Catholic Temperance movement. Apparently John did not see the hypocrisy in this. So I ask him outright if he thought that was hypocritical. He paused for a moment and looked at me as if the thought had never occurred to him in all of his long life. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. After placing them back on his face he looked at me. “I guess a man had to do what a man had to do to take care of his family.”

John taught me a lot that day, not just in the stories of his family but in that I gained a greater insight into the time period. I was already fully aware of the hypocrisy of the prohibition laws in Bangor. How the police would let one person sell alcohol but not another. Or how the wealthy could drink openly but the poor could not. What I had not been aware of was that those who actually sold the liquor were also living double lives. It was a business, they sold it but they were somehow able to separate it from their own inner beliefs.

From the standpoint of a historian John was a gold mine and I was very lucky to have found him. That afternoon as he gathered up his papers and shuffled off I watched him with admiration. He was from another time and because of that he didn’t see things the same way I did. I needed to remember that as I pursued my passion of writing about history. History is full of people that were real and they lived and they made choices and decisions based on the time they lived in. Those decision might seem strange to us now, but they made perfect sense to them. I think that should be remembered.