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List of people from Bangor, Maine

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

Architects and engineers

Artists

  • 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. 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.
  • 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.
  • Frederic Porter Vinton (1846–1911), left Bangor at age 14 for Boston, where he became that city's most sought-after portrait painter—producing over 300 canvases—and one of the original members of the Boston School. He studied in Munich and with 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.
  • Echo Eggebrecht, painter from New York, also a Bangor native.

Athletes

Authors

Civil servants

Clergymen and missionaries

Defendants and detainees

Diplomats

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". 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

Journalists

  • 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
  • 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

Physicians and nurses

  • Charlotte Blake Brown (1846–1904), pioneering female physician who co-founded what became Children's Hospital of San Francisco in 1878, with an all-female staff and board of directors. In 1880 she also founded the first nursing school in the American West. Children's Hospital merged with another institution to become California Pacific Medical Center in 1991
  • Elliott Carr Cutler (1888–1947), son of a Bangor lumber merchant, became Chairman of the Dept. of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and a pioneer in cardiac surgery, inventing a number of important techniques and publishing over 200 papers. He was elected President of the American Surgical Association, and later became surgeon-in-chief at 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
  • Georgia Nevins (1864–1957), nurse, nurse educator, hospital administrator, American Red Cross leader, born in Bangor
  • Mabel Sine Wadsworth (1910–2006), birth control activist

Scholars

Show business/Entertainment

Singers, musicians and songwriters

Soldiers and sailors

Statesmen

Other

References