Howland’s 100th Birthday Party

by Brian Swartz 1926 was a big year

Sometimes the birthday’s so important, not even a raging blizzard will stop Mainers from tossing a party.

When One hundred and forty-eight Howland residents and fans packed the Howland Town Hall on February 10, 1926, they celebrated Howland’s 100th birthday. Slightly more than one hundred years earlier, the Maine Legislature authorized people living in Township 1, Range 7, to practice self-governance as an organized town. The exciting transition from state to local “home rule” occurred on February 10, 1826, only eight years since such settlers as John Bryer, Jacob Doe, Jeremiah Fifield, Levi Lancaster, James Merrill, and the Hammetts (William and William C), started felling the forests along the Piscataquis River to build homes and farms and ultimately a town named for Mayflower Compact signer John Howland.

Spread across thirty-four square miles in central Penobscot County, Howland straddles the Piscataquis River, the winding waterway that drains southern Piscataquis River and a few towns, including Howland and Mayfield, in Penobscot County. Before merging with the Penobscot River along Howland’s eastern shore, the Piscataquis bisects the town and, in the 1800s, dangled the lure that brought some settlers to the region. That lure involved waterpower, not the hydropower associated with Howland’s two current dams, but the waterpower developed by the fast-flowing Piscataquis River.

To create an impoundment, early settlers like William Miller and John Haley and the Scammons (Tom and Tristian), built a dam across the river in 1825. Local residents constructed a double saw-equipped mill on the river’s north shore below the dam. This mill soon expanded to encompass a clapboard machine and a shingle machine that manufactured building products purchased by Howland residents.

In the early to mid-1800s, boats, steam or otherwise, transited the Penobscot River after spring “ice-out,” so the dam’s builders added locks along the south shore so relatively small boats could access the Piscataquis

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River. These locks also let logs go downstream to the Howland sawmill. That sawmill thrived until 1870 when a fast-moving fire — always a danger where combustible sawdust and wood shavings mingle with spark-emitting machinery — leveled the complex. A flooding Piscataquis River claimed the Howland dam in 1872. The Searsport Co. purchased water rights to the defunct Howland impoundment in 1881 and started building a new dam on September 13, 1881, when Rodney Lancaster “threw out the first shovel full of dirt,” the local press excitedly reported.

While mingling in the Howland Town Hall on February 10, 1926, Howland residents had education somewhat on their minds as the Howland High School orchestra performed. Howland’s first school was located on Willow Street, where an empty store served as a place of learning. Town residents built another school in 1902.

Howland, like other Maine small towns, had great pride in their high schools. In 1926 they couldn’t foresee the day when their hometown school would vanish when they and the towns of Edinburg, Enfield, Passadumkeag, and the other central Penobscot County communities formed School Administrative District 31.

The district constructed Hichborn Middle School and Penobscot Valley High School on Cross Street in Howland in the early 1970s. A wing connects the schools, which feature separate gymnasiums and entrances. Howland residents, as do their SAD 31 neighbors, view schools as central to their town’s existence. When the state government nixed a proposed new high school in the early 21st century, and Augusta bureaucrats even suggested that Howland teenagers attend school in Lincoln or Milo, SAD boosters responded with a magnificent fund-raising effort. Backed by Maine Department of Education funding, Hichborn Middle School and Penobscot Valley High School were substantially renovated with updated electric and heating systems. The “Howlers,” as Penobscot Valley High School designates its intervarsity sports teams, play basketball in the high school’s modernized gym, but wrestling remains the dominant sport here.

Wind-driven snow swirled and piled outside Howland’s Town Hall as the town’s 100th birthday bash continued on February 10, 1926. The local American Legion post provided “an appropriate picture,” according to the local press, and one hundred and forty-seven people dutifully listened as Rev. George Currier, a local Baptist minister, lectured about the history of Howland.

That stormy night most people walked or snow-shoed to the centennial festivities, because little formal street plowing took place in Bangor, much less in rural Howland. To pack fresh snow, horse-drawn teams hauled massive rollers that flattened snow, ice, and most objects caught in their paths. The rudimentary automobiles and trucks rumbling through Howland’s streets during the summer of 1925 experienced hazardous travel conditions in the winter of 1926.

Today, diesel-powered plows push away snow falling across Interstate 95, which intersects the Lagrange Road — routes 6 and 155 — just west of “builtup” Howland at Exit 217. Routes 6 and 155 connect Howland with Lagrange to the west and Enfield to the east, across the Penobscot River. Until a large-scale construction project began in 2006, the Lagrange Road remained permanently potholed and frost-heaved year-round, no matter the ambient temperature. Howland residents complained at local stores, in local papers and to anyone who would listen, including local legislators. Lagrange residents, loggers, freight haulers, and school bus drivers added their voices to the “rebuild the road, will ya?” litany. That finally sparked state action and saw the highway completely overhauled with modern drainage systems and widened shoulders.

Routes 6 and 155 span the Penobscot River on a steel-framed bridge, similar to another bridge spanning the Piscataquis River to connect Howland’s points north and south. The Maine State Highway Commission, the precursor to today’s Maine Department of Transportation, constructed similar (cont. on page 32)

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(cont. from page 31) bridges across Maine in the 1930s and 1940s. Such bridges, typically painted a uniform light green, are gradually disappearing as the Department of Transportation replaces them with modern steel-and-concrete bridges. Howland’s two bridges will stand a while longer, but a similar bridge vaulting the East Branch of the Penobscot River at Medway was replaced several years ago.

As Howland’s centennial celebration continued on February 10, 1926, party-goers agreed that “we should do this again in the summer, when it’s warmer.” Howland residents did toss another self-congratulatory party in the summer of 1926. By then, however, the town was six months older, and Howland’s bicentennial lay ninety-nine-plus years in the future. The official Howland bicentennial falls on February 10, 2026. Expect a big party and expect Howland residents to invite friends, relatives, and anyone who loves a small Maine town to join in the fun.

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