List of people from Bangor, Maine

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The following list includes notable people who were born or have lived in Bangor, Maine.

Architects and engineers

• Galveston) and became the first architect in that state, where, joining the Texas Rangers, he was eventually killed and scalped by Apache Indians.^[1] Other prominent Bangor architects, many of whose buildings survive in the city and nearby towns, included Calvin Ryder, Benjamin S. Deane, George W. Orff, C. Parker Crowell, and Wilfred E. Mansur.^[2]
• Persia and a waterworks in its capital, Tehran.^[3]
• Imperial Chinese Government (1895–1918). He planned important hydraulics projects and witnessed the Boxer Rebellion
• RMS Titanic when the ship struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912.^[4]

• Waldo Peirce, painter and bohemian. He was a confidante of Ernest Hemingway and was from a prominent Bangor family.
• Jeremiah Pearson Hardy (1800–1887), portrait painter. He apprenticed under Samuel Morse, lived and worked in Bangor for most of his career, sustained largely by the patronage of lumber barons.^[5] His children Anna Eliza Hardy and Francis Willard Hardy, and sister Mary Ann Hardy, were also part of a 19th-century circle of Bangor painters. Other members of this circle included Florence Whitney Jennison and Isabel Graham Eaton, who was also an author.^[6]
• Walter Franklin Lansil, studied first under Hardy, and then at the Académie Julian in Paris. He established a studio in Boston and became a celebrated landscape and marine artist.
• Leon Bonnat in Paris, as well as with William Morris Hunt
  .
• Helena Wood Smith (1865–1914), member of the artists' colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, was murdered there by her lover, Japanese photographer George Kodani. She was the sister of novelist Ruel Perley Smith.^[7]
• Echo Eggebrecht, painter from New York, also a Bangor native.

Athletes

• Brian Butterfield, Boston Red Sox third base coach was born in Bangor
• Norman Cahners of Bangor qualified for the 1936 Olympic Team trials in track & field, but boycotted the event with Harvard track teammate Milton Green, because the games were to take place in Nazi Germany. Cahners and Green were Jewish. Cahners is a member of the Harvard Varsity Athletic Club Hall of Fame.^[8] He went on to build one of the largest publishing empires in America^[9]
• 2008 Beijing Olympic Games
• Marcus Davis, professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter and his Team Irish currently call Bangor their home
• Jon DiSalvatore, of the National Hockey League (now with the Minnesota Wild)
• Helsinki, Finland. She later became the sister-in-law of Grace Kelly
• Al Harris (born 1956), former National Football League player of the Chicago Bears and Philadelphia Eagles comes from Bangor
• Emily Kagan (born 1981), American mixed martial artist^[10]
• Seibu Lions
• Jack Leggett, Clemson University baseball coach
• Barcelona Olympic Games, and went on to reach the finals of the America's Cup trials with his Bangor-based PACT-95 team^[11]
• Chick Maynard, Former American baseball shortstop
• Jack McAuliffe, World Lightweight Boxing Champion in the 1880s–1890s and known as "The Napoleon of the Ring", learned to fight growing up as a child in a tough Bangor neighborhood. He retired with an unbeaten record. Another local boxer, Michael Daley, became Lightweight Boxing Champion of New England, but was arrested in Bangor in 1903 for robbing a man at a local hotel
• Bobby Messenger, former Major League Baseball player (1901–1964) of the Chicago White Sox and St. Louis Browns
• Matthew Mulligan, of the New England Patriots was born in Bangor
• Pat O'Connell (1861–1943) of the Baltimore Orioles
• University of Texas football team, the Texas Longhorns, and before that the University of Missouri team, the Missouri Tigers. In the same decade, Bangor-born Frank Barbour was Head Coach of the University of Michigan team, the Michigan Wolverines, after playing as quarterback of the national champion Yale University
  team of 1891
• New York Giants and Philadelphia Phillies
• Matt Stairs, Philadelphia Phillies hitter; (though Stairs is a native of New Brunswick, Canada)
• New Jersey Nets and Orlando Magic was born in Bangor. He also won a gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games
  as a member of the U.S. Basketball Team

• Mabel Fuller Blodgett, wrote the novel At the Queen's Mercy when she was 19 years old^[12]
• Laura Curtis Bullard, whose family started a successful patent medicine business in Bangor in the 1830s, eventually moved to Brooklyn and became a proto-feminist novelist and editor. She was a patron and confidante of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and took over editorship of their newspaper The Revolution when it experienced financial difficulties
• Frederick H. Costello (1851–1921), nationally successful writer of adventure novels for young adults, who for 30 years held a day-job as local (Bangor) manager of the R.G. Dunn credit reporting company
• Veazie. Davis wrote between 200 and 300 plays, as well as radio and film scripts, and two autobiographies. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was president of the Author's League of America and the American Dramatist's Guild^[13]
• Henry Payson Dowst (1872–1921), Bangor-born; was a novelist and short-story writer, and saw a number of his stories made into silent films. One was The Dancin' Fool (1920) starring Wallace Reid. He spent his later life in a New York advertising agency, but was buried in Bangor
• Katya Alpert Gilden (1919–1991) of Bangor co-authored with her husband Bert Gilden the best-selling 1965 novel Hurry Sundown, which became an Otto Preminger film in 1967
• Clarine Coffin Grenfell (1910–2004), poet and author, was born and raised in Bangor
• Thoreau
  visited Bangor a number of times (his aunt and cousins also lived here) and describes the city in his book The Maine Woods.
• Blanche Willis Howard, best-selling late 19th-century novelist, was born and raised in Bangor. She eventually moved to Stuttgart, Germany, and married the court physician to King Charles I of Württemberg, thus becoming the Baroness von Teuffel
• The Langoliers and Storm of the Century. King owns radio stations WKIT, WZON, and WZLO
• Helen Maud Merrill (pen name, Samantha Spriggins; 1865–1943), litterateur and poet
• Hayford Peirce, science-fiction writer and nephew of Waldo Peirce, is likewise a Bangor native, as is sci-fi author and cartoonist Alexis A. Gilliland. Other contemporary authors from Bangor include novelists Mameve Medwed, Tim Sullivan, Don J. Snyder, Christina Baker Kline, Christopher Willard; poet David Baker, and children's book authors Susan Lubner and Bruce McMillan.
• Nick Carter series, once producing a 60,000 word novel in two days. His major innovation was to "begin the plot with the first word", i.e. "We will have the money, or she shall die!"^[15]
• Ruel Perley Smith (1869–1937), born in Bangor, author of the Rival Campers series of boy's book in the early 20th century. His regular job was as Night and Sunday Editor of the New York World newspaper^[16]
• Tim Sullivan, science fiction author, was born and raised in Bangor
• George Savary Wasson, painter and author of four novels, lived and worked in Bangor in the early 20th century
• Ceylon and Afghanistan), lived the latter part of her life in Bangor. She had been born in India and much of her fiction was set there.^[17]

• labor unions
  the right to organize
• Jay Stone, of Bangor was Chief Clerk of the War Department in the 1920s
• Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (1959–1970) and thereafter U.S. Director of the Asian Development Bank
  with the rank of Ambassador

• James Drummond Dole became the "Pineapple King"^[20]
• Baltimore, Maryland. The present John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, formerly Catholic but now non-sectarian, is named for him^[22]
• spirit medium in Illinois and Wisconsin. He was also a lecturer and author of books on spiritualism, and editor of the Chicago-based newspaper The Spiritual Republic. He became known as an advocate of women's rights with the publication of his book Social Freedom; Marriage: As It Is and As It Should Be in 1873^[23]
• California Social Work Hall of Distinction
• Lisbon, Portugal
  to assist Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe
• Edward C. O'Leary was Bishop born in Bangor, of the Catholic Diocese of Maine in the 1970s–1980s
• Benjamin Franklin Tefft, Methodist Minister that became president of Genesee College in New York (the nucleus of the later Syracuse University), and, in 1862, U.S. Consul in Stockholm and acting Minister (Ambassador) to Sweden^[24] Congregational minister and Bangor Theological Seminary professor John Russell Herrick later became president of Pacific University in Oregon (1880–83), and the University of South Dakota (1885–87). Rev. Charles Carroll Everett, pastor of the Bangor Unitarian Church 1859–69, Tlater became a noted philosopher of religion and dean of the Harvard Divinity School

Defendants and detainees

• Prescott Freese Dennett, of Bangor was one of 30 people indicted for sedition and tried in Washington in 1944. Dennett stood accused of helping a German agent, George Sylvester Viereck, distribute propaganda designed to keep the U.S. out of the war in Europe. The case ended in a mistrial
• Dorchester, Massachusetts, was arrested and arraigned in Bangor on Dec. 23, 1943, for refusing to register for the draft. He was the New England District Secretary of the Socialist Party of America
  and was opposed to war on political and religious grounds

• Kingdom of Hawaii to the United States, and died on the job during a White House diplomatic reception in 1883. Allen's son, William Fessenden Allen
  , who was born in Bangor, also served in the government of Hawaii, both before and after the Kingdom became an American territory
• Patrick Duddy, of Bangor was the U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela in the Bush administration. He was temporarily expelled from the country in 2008 by President Hugo Chávez in a dispute over an alleged American coup plot
• Albert G. Jewett, U.S. Chargé d'affaires to Peru (1845–1847)
• Maine Governor; was U.S. Consul in Rio de Janeiro 1849–1853, he lost two of his three children to yellow fever
  . His wife died the year they returned to Bangor, and his surviving child soon after
• Wyman Bradbury Seavy Moor
  , U.S. Consul-General to Canada (1857–1861)
• Robert Newbegin II, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras (1958) and Haiti (1960–1961)
• Chester E. Norris, U.S. Ambassador to Equatorial Guinea (1988–1991)
• Gorham Parks, U.S. Consul in Rio de Janeiro (1845–1849)
• Burma (1959–1961) and Paraguay
  (1961–1967)
• Charles Stetson, U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria (1921–1928); Romania (1928), and Yugoslavia (1933)
• Aaron Young Jr., U.S. Consul in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (1863–1873), who was formerly Maine's State Botanist and Secretary of the Bangor Natural History Society. Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's vice president and Bangor politician, served as U.S. Ambassador to Spain later in his career

Inventors

• Melville Sewell Bagley, invented an aperitif named Hesperidina, using the peels of bitter oranges, which became the national liquor of Argentina. It is still produced, with his image on every bottle
• John B. Curtis, commercial Chewing gum was invented in Bangor in 1848 by Curtis. Curtis marketed his product as "State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum".^[25] He later opened a successful gum factory in Portland, Maine. Coincidentally, Bangor-born Frank Barbour, who became a director (and later chairman of the board) of the Beech-Nut Packing Company, would launch that company's famous chewing gum line in 1910

• MOS 6502 microprocessor
  in 1975, was born in Bangor in 1937
• Pearl Harbor Attack. The Army's radar laboratory was named "Watson Laboratories" after his death, and became the kernal of the present USAF Rome Laboratory^[26]

• Margherita Arlina Hamm, spent part of her childhood in Bangor, was a pioneering female journalist who covered the Sino-Japanese War and Spanish–American War for New York newspapers, sometimes from the front lines. She was also a prolific author of popular non-fiction books. A suffragette, she was nonetheless a defender of American imperialism, chairing the pro-war "Woman's Congress of Patriotism and Independence" and writing an heroic biography of Admiral George Dewey^[27]
• Ralph W. 'Bud' Leavitt Jr. longtime columnist and editor for The Bangor Daily News. Born in Old Town, Maine
  , Leavitt became a cub reporter at The Bangor Daily Commercial at age 17 in 1934. Following the Second World War, Leavitt signed on with The News, where he filed, during the course of his career, 13,104 columns devoted to the outdoors, and where he served for many years as executive sports editor. Leavitt also hosted two long-running TV shows about the outdoors on Maine television
• Kate Snow, born in Bangor on June 10, 1969

Judges

• Edward Matthew Curran, who served as Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (1966–1971) was born in Bangor. As a Federal judge in 1949 he presided over the treason trial of Mildred Gillars (aka Axis Sally), who was coincidentally born in Portland
• read law in Bangor with his two uncles after graduating from Bowdoin College
  in 1853. He was admitted to the bar in Bangor in 1855
• Edward Kent Jr., son of Bangor Mayor, Maine Governor, and Maine Supreme Judicial Court Justice Edward Kent, was appointed by his Harvard classmate Theodore Roosevelt as Chief Justice of the Arizona Territory Supreme Court, 1902–1912. He delivered a landmark ruling on water rights (the Kent Decree of 1910)
• Robert Murray served as First District Judge and state legislator

Physicians and nurses

• nursing school in the American West. Children's Hospital merged with another institution to become California Pacific Medical Center
  in 1991
• Brigham Hospital in Boston. During the Second World War he was Chief Surgical Consultant in the European Theatre of Operations with the rank of Brigadier General. Another Bangor-born Harvard Medical School professor, Frederick T. Lord, was a pioneer in the use of serum to treat pneumonia
  , and was elected President of the American Association of Thoracic Surgery
• Harrison J. Hunt, surgeon on the Crocker Land Expedition to the Arctic in 1913–1917, and the first to return to civilization with news of his fellow explorers, who had been trapped in the ice for four years. Hunt escaped after a grueling four-month dog-sled journey accompanied by six Inuit. He spent the rest of his career working at the Eastern Maine Hospital in Bangor, and authored the book North to the Horizon: Arctic Doctor and Hunter, 1913–1917 (Camden, Me: 1930). He is credited with finding the major biological specimens returned by the expedition—eggs of the red knot, which established its migration pattern between Europe and northern Greenland^[29]
• Georgia Nevins (1864–1957), nurse, nurse educator, hospital administrator, American Red Cross leader, born in Bangor
• Mabel Sine Wadsworth (1910–2006), birth control activist^[30]

Politicians

• John Baldacci, former Governor of Maine and United States Representative, was born in Bangor
• John H. Carkin, Oregon lawyer and politician, was born in Bangor
• Joseph Homan Manley, protege and close associate of presidential candidate James G. Blaine, was Chairman of the National Executive Committee of the Republican Party in the 1890s, and Maine's "political boss;" he was born in Bangor

Scholars

• Children's International Summer Villages. She was also President of the International Council of Psychologists^[31]
• Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and eventually Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis^[32]
• Robert Winslow Gordon, became the first Director of the Archives of the American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In the 1910s–1930s he was arguably the leading authority on this genre of music, personally recorded nearly a thousand folk songs and transcribing the lyrics of 10,000 more
• John Irwin Hutchinson (1867–1935), became a noted Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University, and Vice President of the American Mathematical Society
• Ella Boyce Kirk (c. 1861–1930), became Superintendent of Schools in Pittsburgh, one of the first women to hold that office in an American city
• Edith Lesley, founder of Lesley University in Massachusetts; grew up in Bangor
• Egyptologist; of the University of Alabama uses satellite imaging. An earlier archaeologist from Bangor, Henry Williamson Haynes
  , also did field-work in Egypt
• American Sociological Society (1912–1913)^[33]
• Harris Hawthorne Wilder (1864–1928), zoologist; born in Bangor, was a pioneer in fingerprint analysis and forensic science
• William D. Williamson, a Brown University-educated Bangor lawyer who became the second Governor of Maine, was also the state's first historian, producing a two-volume History of the State of Maine as early as 1832. It remained the standard reference throughout the 19th century.^[34]
• University of Wisconsin and president of the University of Maine. He was an economist and expert on international labor relations.^[35]

• Eugene A. Eberle (1840–1917), broadway actor; made his debut as Paris in a Bangor production of Romeo and Juliet.^[36] He played the gravedigger in Edwin Booth's Hamlet in 1864–1865.^[37] By the early 1900s he was in the touring company of acclaimed actor Otis Skinner.^[38]
• Everett Glass (1891–1966), character actor; was born in Bangor. He appeared in more than eighty films and television shows from the 1940s through the 1960s, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and episodes of Superman, Lassie, and Perry Mason.^[39]
• Richard Golden (1854–1909), comic stage actor; called by one turn-of-the-century theatre critic "the best character actor in America" is buried at Bangor's Mount Hope Cemetery^[40] His wife and partner Dora Wiley, "The Sweet Singer of Maine" was the original prima donna of the Boston Opera Company
• Sally Jesse Raphael. Greeley also served four terms in the Maine Legislature
• Leonard Horn (1926–1975), directed episodes of 34 prime-time television series and a number of made-for-TV movies between 1959 and 1975, including Mission: Impossible, Mannix, It Takes a Thief, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Outer Limits, and Lost in Space.^[41]
• Bob Marley, comedian; born and raised in Bangor, has appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien as well as Comedy Central and cult film "The Boondock Saints"
• CBS's Lancer western series, was reared in Bangor though born in New Brunswick
  , Canada
• Stephanie Niznik, actress; of the television series Everwood and the film Star Trek: Insurrection was also reared in Bangor^[42]
• Priscilla Presley, actress and businesswoman; went to Mary Snow School during 2nd grade^[43]
• Charles Rocket (1949–2005), comedian/actor; cast member on Saturday Night Live, and appeared in more than eighty other television shows and films, including Touched by an Angel, Miami Vice, and Star Trek: Voyager
• Visual Effects Society Award^[44] A second visual effects man from Bangor, Christopher Mills, has contributed to such films as Evan Almighty, The Golden Compass, and Night at the Museum^[45]
• Academy Award winning Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans.^[46] He died in Bangor and is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery
• Gary Thorne, sportscaster; born here and once served as an assistant district attorney in the city

Singers, musicians and songwriters

• folk songs); victim of McCarthyism in the 1950s, taught at the nearby University of Maine
  from 1969 and died in Bangor in 1980
• Dick Curless, country singer; recorded the 1965 hit Tombstone Every Mile, also lived there
• Howie Day, singer-songwriter; recorded the hit "Collide", was born in Bangor, and got his start playing local clubs
• Kay Gardner (1941–2002), flutist and pioneering composer of 'healing music' lived and died in Bangor
• R. B. Hall, conductor of the Bangor Band, became an internationally famous composer of marches. His 'Death or Glory' remains a march classic in the UK and Commonwealth counties
• Sarah Robinson-Duff (died 1934), soprano and famous voice teacher^[47]
• The Battle Cry of Freedom, lived in Bangor before becoming a successful music publisher in Chicago
• New Orleans Symphony Orchestra, came to Bangor in 1981 to direct the Bangor Symphony
  and did so until his death in 1992
• Johnny Williams, father of film composer John Williams lived there according to his 2022 Lenox Library interview.

Soldiers and sailors

• Charles A. Boutelle, Naval Lt. that accepted the surrender of the Confederate fleet after the Battle of Mobile Bay, where he commanded an ironclad. Another Bangor sailor, Thomas Taylor received the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in the same battle. Boutelle became a long-serving U.S. Congressman and proponent of American naval power. Boutelle Ave. in Bangor is named for him
• George Adams Bright, Rear Admiral; surgeon and medical director of the Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C.
• Harris Merrill Plaisted. Cyrus Hamlin, who commanded a regiment of African-American troops, and Charles Hamlin, both sons of Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, also became generals in the Civil War. Other Bangorians who achieved a general's rank in the same conflict included Edward Hatch, who commanded the cavalry division of Grant's Army of the Tennessee; Charles W. Roberts; George Varney; John F. Appleton and Daniel White. Col. Daniel Chaplin, who died in battle, was posthumously made a Maj. General. Brig. Gen. George Foster Shepley became the military governor of Louisiana, and later of Richmond, Virginia
  , the former Confederate capitol
• Pearl Harbor. He became the first captain of the battleship USS New Jersey, and ended the war as a Rear Adm. commanding Cruiser Division Pacific. He was on the deck of the USS Missouri
  to witness the Japanese surrender in 1945
• Molly Kool (1916–2009), first registered female sea captain in North America, spent the last years of her life in Bangor
• Fort Hood
• Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, and retired as deputy director of Defence Research and Engineering in the Pentagon^[48]
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Other

• Holland "Holly" Hanson Coors (1920–2009), beer baroness and political donor was born in Bangor. The ex-wife of Joseph Coors, Colorado brewer and founder of the Heritage Foundation, Holly Coors sat on that organization's board of trustees
• Bangor High School. She was the only wife of an Australian Prime Minister to have been foreign-born until Annita van Iersel, wife of Paul Keating
  (who served 1991–1996). She became Lady Gorton when her husband was knighted in 1977
• Abby Fisher Leavitt (1836–1897), social reformer
• Corelli C. W. Simpson (1837–1923), American poet, cookbook author, painter; opened the first kindergarten in Bangor

References