Talk:Bangor, Maine/trivia

This page contains content that moved here from Bangor, Maine per WP:TRIVIA and WP:USCITIES and the discussion here: Talk:Bangor,_Maine#Article_size:_too_long.

Accidents, natural disasters and infamous incidents

• 1947: A fire in the municipal power station caused a city-wide electrical blackout.
• 1854: The schooner Manhattan of Bangor was lost in a gale off New Jersey. There was a single survivor.
• 1856: The brig William H. Safford of Bangor was cut through by ice while anchored in the East River at New York, and 8 of 10 aboard drown, including the captain, his wife, and 2 children.
• 1860: The brig Mary Pierce, sailing with lumber from Bangor to New Haven, was lost in a storm off Cape Cod with 6 crew and a child. One sailor survived. The brig H.N. Jenkins of Bangor, bound for Havana, Cuba, was demasted in a storm and the captain the 3 crew killed. 2 were rescued by a passing whaler.* 1869: The schooners Susan Duncan and Susan Hicks of Bangor, both carrying lumber, were lost with all hands in a storm off Cape Cod.
• 1896: The barkentine Thomas J. Stewart of Bangor was lost at sea in a hurricane with all hands (11 men) somewhere between New York and Boston The ship was named after one of Bangor's principal entrepreneurs, the owner of a large fleet of ocean-going vessels.
• 1898: The steamer Pentagoet of the Manhattan Line was lost in a gale between New York City and Bangor with all 16 hands. In the same storm, two schooners sailing from Bangor to Fall River, Massachusetts loaded with lumber, the William Slater and Oriole were similarly lost with no survivors.
• 1900: The schooner Ada Herbert sailing from Gloucester, Massachusetts to Bangor was lost with all four crew.
• 1907: The sloop Ruth E. Cummack capsized in Penobscot Bay, drowning six young men, five of them from Bangor.
• 1858: The floor of an auction store in Bangor gave way, sending 200 men, women, and children into the building's cellar. Many were injured but none killed.
• 1882: A tornado blew the steeple off the Universalist Church, the roof off the County Courthouse, and sent hundreds of chimneys into the street. The same year another tornado overturned the launch Annie in the Penobscot River drowning 8 passengers.
• 1928: Tiger-tamer Mabel Stark while performing in the John Robinson Circus in Bangor, was attacked by two of her tigers and severely mauled in front of a large crowd. She survived, and went on to survive 17 more tiger attacks, though none as bad as the one in Bangor.
• 1937: Al Brady, An armed robber and murderer is shot dead in a shoot out with his accomplice, ending The Brady Gang. The spectacular public gun-battle that led to the demise of "The Brady Gang" is an essential part of Maine folklore, and was even the subject of a re-enactment in 2007.
• 1938: A short earthquake on August 22 broke glass and crockery across the city, and cut telephone service in some areas for 15–20 minutes. It was felt more strongly in Brewer.
• 1984: The 740 ft. tall WVII TV antenna and 550 ft. tall WABI-TV antenna both collapsed under ice, knocking seven TV and radio stations off the air.
• 1984: Charlie Howard was thrown from a bridge and murdered for being gay.
• 1998: The North American Ice Storm of 1998. Bangor was among a few metropolitan areas in the United States affected by this freakish storm, which was a major natural disaster for Canada. Electricity was knocked out for more than a week in some areas as all trees, utility poles, and other objects were coated with a glistening layer of ice.
• 1791: The first vessel built in Bangor was the schooner Susannah, laid down in 1791 and launched in 1793. She was built a short distance below the Penjejawock stream by Robert Treat, she was known as the "Treat ship" until it was purchased in 1793 by Robert Hichborn of Fort Point (now known as Stockton Springs), and came to be called a Hichborn packet. Built to haul lumber, fish, poultry, and butter to the Boston markets. En route to be sold in Boston when she struck rocks off Boon Island in October, 1798. All aboard were lost at sea, including members of well-known families. Parts of the ship and articles of the passengers were recovered off Halibut Point near Cape Ann, including the chest of clothing of S. Noble, Jr., son of Rev. Seth Noble. Friends and family of Paul Revere were also on this vessel, including members of the Hichborn family on route to the marriage of Susannah Hichborn. Twenty passengers and crew all died at sea. The Master of the ship was Captain Daniel Jameson, who lived at the time of his death in Bangor (today Orono) near Jameson Falls.
• 1833: A steamship named Bangor had been built in 1833 for the Boston & Bangor Steamship Co. by Bell & Brown of New York. She was in service till 1842, when she was bought by a Turkish company, renamed the "Sudaver", and used as a ferry in Istanbul (then Constantinople).
• 1891: a four-masted schooner named The Bangor was also built in Eureka, California, in 1891. The City of Bangor was an Eastern Steamship Co. steamer, built 1894 in East Boston, that connected Bangor and Boston on a daily run in the early 20th century. The Tacoma class frigate USS Bangor (PF-16), launched in 1943, escorted North Atlantic convoys during World War II.
• 1903: The Bangor-based schooner Willie L. Newton turned turtle (upside down) in a storm off Connecticut, with loss of all hands (7 men).

The Bangor, the first U.S.-built ironhulled steamship

Main Street in c. 1920

• 1889: Forest fires in surrounding towns enveloped Bangor in smoke.
• 1908: Forest fires burned in surrounding towns. 1,000 men fought them within a 35-mile radius of Bangor.
• 1908: Bangor's first automobile accident claimed the life of 10-year-old Freddie O'Conner, who ran in front of a chauffeur-driven Pope Hartford which was running down State Street without its lights at dusk.
• 1911: In Bangor's first automobile accident fatal to the driver, artist Emma Webb was killed and her two passengers injured in a collision with an electric street-railroad car.
• 1939: a truck carrying dynamite from Bangor through Holden, Maine was blown to bits, killing 6.

History

The local chapter of the American Anti-Slavery Society had 105 members in 1837, and a parallel Female Anti-Slavery Society with 100 more. In 1841, the gubernatorial candidate of the anti-slavery Liberty Party received more votes in Bangor than in any other city in Maine.

In 1900, Bangor was still shipping wooden spools to England and wooden fruit boxes to Italy. An average of 2,000 vessels called at Bangor each year.

In 1909, Robert E. Peary, after leading the first expedition to reach the North Pole, returned by train to the United States from Canada, via Bangor, where he was treated to a reception and given an engraved silver cup. Peary's Arctic exploration ship, the Roosevelt, had been built just south of Bangor on Verona Island.

From 1960–64, Bangor was one of a dozen BOMARC anti-aircraft missile bases. Abandoned by the Air Force four years after construction, the fortified concrete missile bunkers long survived, and a deactivated BOMARC missile was briefly mounted, next to Paul Bunyan at Bass Park. Today the BOMARC site has been turned into an industrial park which is home to Hartt Trucking and Bean's Meats as well as a number of small businesses and organizations that occupy the former missile bunkers.

In November 1944, two German spies - Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh - landed on the Maine coast by U-boat and hitched a ride to Bangor, where they boarded a train to New York. They were eventually arrested and tried after an extensive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) manhunt.

The first lawsuit was brought in 1790, when Jacob Buswell sued David Wall for calling him "an old damned grey-headed bugar of Hell" and Rev. Seth Noble "a damned rascall".

In 1915, the German agent Werner Horn attempted to dynamite the international railroad bridge in Vanceboro but was captured and arraigned on federal charges in Bangor. Later that year, $100 million in British gold bullion was shipped by rail from Halifax to New York, over that same bridge and through Bangor, in order to pay war-related debts.

Famous people from Bangor

Bangor has produced nine Governors of Maine (tied with Augusta for most by a Maine city): William D. Williamson, Edward Kent, Hannibal Hamlin, Harris M. Plaisted, Frederick W. Plaisted, Frederic H. Parkhurst, Robert Haskell, John McKernan, and John Baldacci. A number of others were born in or lived in suburban towns such as Brewer, Hampden, and Orono.

Media

Bangor Metro, founded in 2005, is the area's glossy business, lifestyle, and opinion magazine.

Infrastructure

Five major airlines offer over 60 flights a day, giving the city non-stop service to Boston, Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Orlando, and seasonal non-stop service to New York's LaGuardia Airport and Minneapolis. Most of the major car rental companies have desks at the airport.

Bangor in popular culture

Books and plays

Bangor or its alter ego Derry are the fictional settings for so many novels and stories by Stephen King that the city has become the capital of Transylmainia, a gothic horror-scape King invented largely by himself (with some help from the 1960s television show Dark Shadows). Bangor locations were featured most prominently in King's novel It.

Bangor is the home of the protagonist in John Guare's famous play Landscape of the Body. In Henry James' short story A Bundle of Letters, Miranda Hope from Bangor is a tourist in Paris. Billy Barry, the fictional hero in Horace Porter's Young Aeroplane Scouts novel series of 1916–19, is also from Bangor, as is Edward Wozny, the protagonist in Lev Grossman's 2004 novel Codex, and Sir Kevin Dean de Courtney MacNair in Hayford Peirce's time-travel novel Napoleon Disentimed. The character Teresa Bruckham is a horror novelist from Bangor in Lily Strange's novel Lost Beneath the Surface. The character Dr. Benjamin Northcote is Bangor's city coroner, and part of the crime-fighting team in Kathy Lynn Emerson's Diana Spaulding Mystery series.

Bangor is the setting for Christina Baker Kline's 1999 novel Desire Lines. The 1988 novel Pink Chimneys by Ardeana Hamlin Knowles, is set in 19th century Bangor. The Big House by Mildred Wasson, published in 1926, describes a wealthy family in decline in early 20th century Bangor (renamed 'Hamlin'). Owen Davis' Pulitzer Prize winning 1923 play Icebound is set in neighboring Veazie. Bangor is also one location in the 1992 novel Prussian Blue by Tom Hyman.

A "frolicsome night place" in Bangor called "The Sea Hag" figures incidentally in the Tennessee Williams short-story Sabbatha and Solitude. In Rudyard Kipling's and Wolcott Balestier's The Naulahka: A Story of East and West, a family of missionaries in India hails from Bangor (and even has their maple syrup delivered from home). Henry David Thoreau's The Maine Woods includes this passage describing Bangor: "Like a star at the edge of the night, still hewing the forests of which it is built, already overflowing with the luxuries and refinements of Europe, and sending its vessels to Spain, to England, to the West Indies for its groceries"

In John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, he learns an important lesson in a little restaurant just outside of Bangor.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale begins with the discovery of a footlocker full of cassette tapes in the ruins of what was once Bangor, a prominent way-station on "The Underground Femaleroad" in the dystopic Republic of Gilead.

Marguerite Beaulieu's French-language story Bangor, Maine, USA was published in Horrifique 13 (1994)

Poems

Robert Lowell's Flying from Bangor to Rio 1957 was written at the poet's summer house in nearby Castine, Maine about the experience of seeing off his friend, the poet Elizabeth Bishop at the Bangor Airport. The home of Junior in Everything Matters

Songs

Bangor, Maine is steeped in musical history. Reverend Seth Noble named Bangor in 1791 for the popular hymn tune of his day, written by William Tans'ur and first published in 1734 in London. Paul Revere and Josiah Flagg did an engraving and printed and published it in Boston in 1764; A COLLECTION OF THE BEST PSALM TUNES. This publication shows that the popularity of the BANGOR TUNE qualified it for an earlier Bostonian version of our current "Top 10 List" of popular songs. The BANGOR TUNE was also very popular in Scotland and has been mistakenly called a Scottish psalm tune. It was so popular that Robert Burns mentioned it in his famous poem, "The Ordination." It was also performed at the funeral service for President George Washington in 1799 in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Bangor is mentioned in King of the Road, a country song by Roger Miller. The line goes "Third boxcar, midnight train. Destination: Bangor, Maine." Southbound Train by Travis Tritt has a similar reference. This formula—using rhyming Maine and train, and Bangor as an edge destination—first appeared in the popular 1871 song Riding Down From Bangor (or Riding Up From Bangor) by Louis Shreve Osborne. The lyric goes: "Riding down from Bangor in an eastern train, after six weeks of hunting in the woods of Maine." It was recorded in Britain and South Africa, though never in the United States. A fragment of the lyric (changed to "Riding down from Bangor on the midnight train...") appears in the quodlibet of the arrangement for orchestra and chorus of Charles Ives's song "The Circus Band," though apparently with a different melody. George Orwell wrote about the song in his 1946 essay Riding Down from Bangor. As a child, he remembered, "my picture of nineteenth-century America was given greater precision by a song which is still fairly well known and which can be found (I think) in the Scottish Student's Song Book." The most recent play on this formula was a song by Garrison Keillor, sung on his radio show Prairie Home Companion on May 3, 2008, which went "Bangor Maine, Bangor Maine; Take a boat or ride the train; Take a slicker, it might rain; In Bangor, Maine"

A fatal accident on the Bangor and Piscataquis Railroad between Bangor and Old Town in 1848 is the subject of the earliest known railroad song, Henry Sawyer.

Bangor is named in the North American version of I've Been Everywhere by Lucky Starr. How 'bout them Cowgirls by George Strait includes the line "I've crisscrossed down to Key Biscayne, and Chi-town via Bangor, Maine. George also mentions Bangor in his song "Brothers of the Highway" off of his Grammy award winning album Troubadour."

The Rooftops of Bangor by the Minneapolis indie group The God Damn Doo Wop Band was inspired by a line in a love letter to member Katie (Kat) Naden.

Old Town native Patty Griffin mentions a "bus that's going to Bangor" in the first line of her autobiographical song Burgundy Shoes from her 2007 Grammy Award-nominated album Children Running Through.

The song Band of Brothers by Dierks Bentley also mentions Bangor. The lyrics go "From the bars of San Diego to the county fair way up in Bangor, Maine".

The Bogeyman from Bangor, Maine is a cut on Norwegian rock band Titanic's 1992 Lower the Atlantic album.

The Mountain Goats recorded a song entitled "Going to Bangor" for an early cassette release (later included on 1999's Bitter Melon Farm compilation).

A music video, called "We Are Bangor", was created by local Bangoreans emphasizing on the correct pronunciation of Bangor. The video was formally shown at the annual Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce awards at the Cross Insurance Center in 2015. Important figures of the city make an appearance in the video such as Duck of Justice, Emily Cain and News Center's Steve McKay.

Film and television

Several movie versions of Stephen King's stories have been filmed in and around Bangor. The Langoliers was set and filmed in part at Bangor International Airport. Pet Sematary and Graveyard Shift include scenes filmed at Mt. Hope Cemetery and The Bangor Water Works. Creepshow 2 includes scenes filmed in Bangor, Brewer, and nearby Dexter, Maine. In the 1996 film Thinner King himself plays a character named "Dr. Bangor". The 1984 movie Firestarter, based on a King novel, held its world premiere at the Bangor Cinema, with King, Drew Barrymore and Dino de Laurentiis in attendance.

The 1946 film The Strange Woman starring Hedy Lamarr, and based on the novel by Ben Ames Williams is set in early 19th century Bangor.

The fictional town of Collinsport, Maine, the setting for 1960s gothic TV soap opera Dark Shadows, was 50 miles from Bangor, according to the script of the first episode. The equally fictional "Bangor Pine Hotel" was a location in two first-season scenes. Likewise, The Dead Zone, a series based on the Stephen King novel, takes place in a fictional suburb of Bangor called Cleaves Mills.

The title character in the 2004 television film, Celeste in the City was from Bangor.

In 1987 Late Night with David Letterman conducted an on-air campaign to get Bangor to watch Dave, after discovering he had unusually low ratings there. He even resorted to reading random names from the local phonebook.

Julie "The Cat" Gaffney from The Mighty Ducks (film series) is from Bangor.

The Canadian television series Trailer Park Boys featured a train convention in Bangor on the season 7 episode "Friends of the Road".

A series of Saturday Night Live sketches, titled "Maine Justice", feature Bangor.

In episode 9, season 2 of the television comedy "Louie", Louie's estranged friend Eddie mentions travelling to Bangor.

Comic books

MODOK, the villainous Marvel Comics character, was created from the benign lab technician George Tarleton, a native of Bangor. The G.I. Joe character Sneak Peek is also from Bangor, along with Crystal Ball's mother. The location of DC Comics second Dial H for Hero series is a suburb of Bangor.

Food

Chocolate (Bangor) Brownies

The earliest documented recipe for chocolate brownies referred to them as Bangor Brownies. Fanny Farmer invented "brownies" in her 1896 cookbook, but these were molasses-flavored, had a nut on top, and were baked in individual pans. The first recipe for what we'd recognize today as chocolate brownies was published in the Boston Daily Globe on April 2, 1905, pg. 34 and read:

BANGOR BROWNIES.
Cream 1/2 cup butter, add 2 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 2 squares of chocolate (melted), 1/2 cup broken walnuts meats, 1/2 cup flour. Spread thin in buttered pans. Bake in moderate oven, and cut before cold.

The 1907 Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter Lowney Chocolate Co., contained two chocolate brownie recipes. The one with extra chocolate, and baked in a pan, it also called "Bangor Brownies". The use of the term in printed recipes continued into the 1950s.

The Appledore Cookbook of 1872 included a recipe for "Bangor Cake", repeated in the Woman's Suffragette Cookbook of 1886, and others as late as 1916.

Two varieties of plum, the "Mclaughlin" and the "Penobscot", were first identified in the garden of John Mclaughlin of Bangor in 1846, and publicized the same year in A. J. Downing's The Horticulturalist. The Mclaughlin had become the most prominent American-cultivated plum by the 1850s, surpassing all others in its "rich and luscious flavor" according to the Magazine of Horticulture. Both continue to be grown throughout North America and Europe.

Business

Two businesses listed on the New York Stock Exchange have used "Bangor" in their names. The Bangor and Aroostook Railroad was founded in Bangor in 1891. In 1964, it merged with the Boston-owned but Cuba-based Punta Alegre Sugar Corp., forming Bangor Punta Alegre Sugar (renamed Bangor Punta in 1967). Two years later, the railroad was sold on the advice of company director Curtis Hutchins, a former B&A president. Managed by Hungarian-American financier Nicolas Salgo (who also built the Watergate complex in Washington), and with Bangorean Hutchins still on the board, the company became a classic 1960s conglomerate, accumulating such diverse holdings as the arms-maker Smith & Wesson, Piper Aircraft, and a number of yacht-makers. It was on the Fortune 500 List for most of its existence. Salgo was bought out in 1974 and the corporation dissolved in 1984.

Sports

The Eastern Maine High school basketball Tournament is held each February at the Bangor Auditorium, drawing fans from central, eastern and northern Maine. The nearby University of Maine fields teams in football, ice hockey, baseball, and men's and women's basketball.

Bangor High School's boys and girls swim teams have won more state championships than any other "class A" high school in the state. Its baseball and basketball teams have the highest total of first- or second-place finishes; its football team shares that record with South Portland.

Bangor was home to two minor league baseball teams affiliated with the 1995-98 Northeast League: the Bangor Blue Ox (1996–97) and the Bangor Lumberjacks (2003–04). Even earlier the Bangor Millionaires (1894–96) played in the New England League.

A skillful competitor in the sport of birling (log-rolling) has traditionally been known as a Bangor Tiger. This was the name given Penobscot river-drivers in the 19th century.

Bangor also hosts an annual Soapbox Derby race, and a Paul Bunyan marathon (cancelled for 2017).

Rankings

Bangor has been ranked high on several "best places" lists published by national magazines and websites. Examples include:

• Downeast Magazine' ranked Bangor as one of the Eight Best Places to Live in Maine in 2015
• The American Lung Association's State of the Air Report (2014) declared Bangor the Cleanest City in the United States for ozone pollution and short-term particle pollution. Bangor was the 23rd Cleanest City for year-round particle pollution, and the second cleanest in the Northeast.
• Forbes Magazine', "25 Best Places to Retire in 2013". (Bangor was the only northeastern city on the list.)
• AARP Magazine', "2013 List of Best Places to Live the Good Life for Under $30K."
• Livability.com, "Top 10 Winter Cities", 2011 and 2012.
• RelocateAmerica.com, "America's Top 100 Places to Live", 2010.
• Children's Health Magazine', "Top 25 Places to Raise a Family", 2009.
• Money Magazine', "Top 25 Places to Retire", 2009.

Gallery

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  Cascade Park on State Street in Bangor is located near the Eastern Maine Medical Center.]]
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  Kenduskeag Stream
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  Waterfront view
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  Closeup of the River Driver statue in Bangor by the sculptor Charles Tefft
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  Eastern Trust Building (1912) in Great Fire of 1911 Historic District
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  Lower Main Street
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  State Street ~ 1908
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  Downtown Bangor
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  With more than eighty stores, Bangor Mall off Interstate 95.
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  Bangor Public Library
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  Bangor Opera House
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  Library dome
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  Bangor Hose House No. 5 (now Fire Museum)
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  West Market Square
• Sculpture "Continuity of Community" (1969) in West Market Square
  Sculpture "Continuity of Community" (1969) in West Market Square
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  Downtown Bangor
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  St. John's Roman Catholic Church with Thomas Hill Standpipe in the distance
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  Artist Waldo Peirce (left), with brother and art-historian Hayford Peirce (right) and wives, before a night at the Bangor Opera in the 1930s.
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  Bangor Savings Bank at 99 Franklin Street
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  The Federal Building in Bangor
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  Cascade Park on State Street in Bangor is located near the Eastern Maine Medical Center.
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  The Peirce Memorial, adjacent to the Bangor Public Library, commemorates the colorful log drivers on the Penobscot River.
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  The Paul Bunyan statue.
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  Log boom in 1910
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  Bangor in 1875
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  Old Post Office, now Bangor City Hall

Further reading

• Bergquist, David H. Bangor in World War II: From the Homefront to the Embattled Skies (Arcadia Publishing, 2015)
• History of Bangor, Maine (1886)
• Lee, Maureen Elgersman. Black Bangor: African-Americans in a Maine Community, 1880–1950 (University Press of New England, 2005)
• Scee, Trudy Irene. City on the Penobscot: A Comprehensive History of Bangor, Maine (History Press, 2010)
• Shaw, Richard R., and Brian F. Swartz. Legendary Locals of Bangor (Arcadia Publishing, 2015)
• City Directory. 1859; 1882.

External links

• Maine.gov – Bangor, Maine
• Bangor Public Library
• Bangor Historical Society
• Maine Aviation Historical Society & Maine Air Museum
• Bangorinfo.com High-quality cultural content
• Bangor Convention & Visitors Bureau – Tourism Information
• Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce
• Downtown Bangor
• Bangor Metro magazine
• "Bangor" in Maine: An Encyclopedia
• inBangor.com - Exploring News, Events, Sports, and Businesses in Bangor, Maine