Banner Year

BELFAST BRINGS LOCAL HISTORY TO LIFE TO CELEBRATE MAINE'S BICENTENNIAL AND THE CITY'S 250TH .

When the pandemic scuttled plans to celebrate Maine’s bicentennial and Belfast’s 250th birthday, city leaders came up with a creative way for locals and visitors to pay homage to Belfast’s colorful history. They took it outside. The Penobscot Marine Museum teamed up with the Belfast Historical Society and Museum, and local designer Norma Whitman to create a series of six expansive banners with historic photos of city life, drawing on both museums’ vast collections. “We wanted images that celebrated Belfast’s architecture, industries, special places, and its citizens at work and at play,” says Kevin Johnson, photo archivist from the Penobscot Marine Museum. Each banner has a theme that relates to the location where it is hung. “It’s amazing to recognize what is still there, and see what is no longer,” he adds. The project was funded by grants from the Maine Bicentennial Commission and the City of Belfast. Other local partners included the Belfast Area Chamber of Commerce, the Belfast Creative Coalition, Whitecap Builders, and Our Town Belfast. The banners will remain up through Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2021. Learn more about the collection at ourtownbelfast.org.

1: Masonic Building 137 High Street

This banner shows residents at play across the ages. It includes a circus parade on Main Street - complete with a camel and an elephant that would have come to town via steamboat - which would have happened around 1900. It also includes a 1935 photo of the Colonial Theatre, which opened the night the Titanic made its fateful trip in 1912, and the Broiler Day Festival in 1949, a celebration of the city's poultry-processing industry, which dominated the city in the middle part of the century.

2: Front Street Shipyard Spar Shed, on the Harbor Walk. 39 Front Street

This banner pays homage to the city's shipbuilding past, an appropriate theme for this location in Front Street Shipyard, which ushered in a modern era of shipbuilding to the city when it opened in 2011. The banner features the four-masted schooner Pendleton Brothers (II) under construction in Belfast around 1902 and The Pendleton Sisters on launch day in 1906.

3: Macleod's Furniture 187 High Street

This banner, which includes a sweeping view of the west side of Belfast Harbor, includes a lithograph by J.H. Bufford's and Sons, which was commissioned for the book History of Belfast in the State of Maine: From Its First Settlement in 1770 to 1875, Volume One.

4: Key Bank 111 Main Street

This banner shows George Dunbar, the city's steeplejack, around 1920, atop the Waldo County Courthouse, with city hall in view. Dunbar was known to scale the city's larger buildings in town even when he wasn't on the job. It also shows the corner of Main and Church Streets, plus a view of Post Office Square looking down Main Street showing a parade, as well as spectators and carriages during Old Home Week events around 1901.

5: Consumer Fuel Company 12 Main Street, offices of the Belfast Area Chamber of Commerce

This banner showcases activity in and around the harbor, including a winter scene on lower Main Street around 1895 and a 1914 photo of employees of the Eastern Illustration and Publishing Company, the postcard publishing company that operated in Belfast from 1909 to 1947. It also shows a baptism in the

harbor, a yachting party around 1901, and the steamer Belfast, which ran between Bangor and Boston between 1909 and 1935.

6: Opera House 109 Church Street

This banner, which hangs across from the Belfast Police Department, shows a photo of the police department around 1940, plus a "tramp chair" with a young boy posing inside. It also includes a 1948 photo of the triangular Hayford Block at the intersection of Main, Church, and Beaver Streets - which was built in 1866 after a devastating fire. The iconic building looks strikingly similar to the way it appears today.