Across the United States, there are nearly a dozen instances of place names that closely resemble “The Devil’s Half Acre.” Oftentimes, these districts or neighborhoods reference the kinds of activities that occur there. Vice. Above all else, drinking alcohol. It is likely that the term emerges from a 19th century context in which Christian revivalism and temperance placed Satan’s moniker onto the saloon and barroom. While some of these locations have lost their names, some still remain.
Putnam County, Georgia had one of the first Devil’s Half Acres when a man purchased the property in 1806 and opened a dram shop which was home to the great vice of drunkenness until the 1830s when religion pushed shut it down. (Goff) Similar appellations exist in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, while South Carolina and Wyoming have Hell’s Half Acres. San Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast also had a booze-and-brothel Devil’s Acre. Finally, in the heyday of Maine’s logging industry, the city of Bangor was home to a Devil’s Half Acre where loggers came from the woods to debauch like pirates did from the sea in Barbados.
Bangor, Maine–Prior to 1915, the city was America’s lumbering capital thanks to its unique geography on the Penobscot River, allowing vessels flying flags of all nations to access the state’s massive internal forests from the ocean. This arrangement made Bangor the center of two occupations with similar penchants for binging. The sailors, docking in the Penobscot to load up with lumber, and the lumberjacks, leaving the woods after months of heavy labor. Both of these populations would mix the deprivation of many months in wilderness with a handsome half-year payday. When they came to Bangor, they took their business to the Devil’s Half Acre.
It may come as a surprise, but the loggers of Maine worked from October to March through the harsh winter because movement of lumber was more simple on frozen ground covered with snow. When spring came and the forest thawed, the logs would be floated downriver to saw mills and the lumberjacks would head into the city.
Logging in the Great North Woods reached its height during the 1840s and 50s when Bangor had converted itself into an epicenter of all things logging: lumbering, milling, transporting, exporting, and entertaining the loggers. The entertainment of the loggers became particularly notorious towards the end of the 19th century, when the Devil’s Half Acre caught on. During this time, the state of Maine had de jure prohibition of alcohol (it was the first state to go dry in 1851), but the bars in Bangor followed their own rules. They paid an unofficial tax to the city which was really a heavy fine for violating the law, enabling them to continue sales. (WLBZ) Corruption of the police was the rule.
An 1884 story titled “Getting Drunk in Maine,” claimed that the city had 138 bars for the loggers to spend their winter pay of $50-$150. The article sets the drunken scene: “The streets of Bangor are now swarming with returned woodsmen, and at night certain quarters of the town are in an uproar with their shouts, songs and many rows. About 1,000 men come to Bangor from the lumbering camps…and hang around until the drinking season opens.” (Times-Picayune, 23 April 1884) As institutionalized as the logging season was for the industry, the drinking season was a sure fire consequence.
Bangor became known for the excess and vice that occurred along the Penobscot in the spring. Jokes were made about dropping the problematic drunks into the nearby Kenduskeag Stream. But really, the Devil’s Half Acre was a bad deal for the poor laboring lumberjack. Ives gives the popular barroom song:
In Bangor they’ll poison the youth with bad whiskey
To the devil they’ll banish all brandy and ale,
And then on the corner they find the youth tipsy,
They’ll send for Tim Leary and march him to jail
It is easy to begin to question why the city let the alcoholic orgy occur under a prohibition regime. Logging was a dangerous, frigid, and tiresome experience. Most Mainers did not want to sign up for the meager pay. One contemporary author who lived near the Devil’s Half Acre described the loggers in the city as “a motley crowd of gaunt, haggard, sun-baked mosquito-bitten, bearded men.” (Ring)
By the end of the 19th century, the majority of the loggers were not from Maine. They were Canadians from the small island province of Prince Edward Island. These migrant laborers would come to log for the winter, drink for the spring, and sail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts for the summer fishing season. Part of the reason that vice was so permissible in dry Maine, was that the logging moguls wanted their workers to spend all their money and be forced back into another winter of hard labor. (Ives)
The region continued to host drunkenness and prostitution until logging’s ultimate demise. Maine’s August Chronicle wrote in 1909, “If Neal Dow could come back to earth and drop into the Queen City of the East he would be deeply grieved and shocked to see what a mockery is being made of his pet law…everywhere–the saloon doors are again wide open, and they are ‘selling it out’ as fast as bartenders can work.” Neal Dow was the Maine politician who instigated the state’s dry law. Some would call him the father of Prohibition.
But, in 1911 the Devil’s Half Acre burned in the Great Fire of 1911 leaving almost none of its original structures behind. By 1915 the lumbering industry shifted north and west, leaving the Central Mainers to the pulpwood business. (Coolidge) Paper mills still pepper the region today. The devil, a savvy investor in real estate, knew when to sell. The name Devil’s Half Acre is still remembered by some Bangoreans, but now it is Haymarket Square or Exchange Street by the Kenduskeag waterfront.
Modern Bangor is no longer known for its brothels (perhaps I just don’t know where to look), but the downtown is now home to a new wave of breweries. Local beer flows freely blocks away from the land where Caribbean grog would have emptied the loggers’ pockets. But Penobscot country, which is seated in Bangor, ranks fairly healthy in alcohol use relative to other counties according to Maine’s State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup.
Even so, the time is remembered with some fondness today. The Bangor Historical Society offers a guided walking tour of the streets where the Devil’s Half Acre used to be. The tour is guided by an infamous Bangorean of the late 1800s, Fan Jones. She was Madam of the Sky Blue House which had its chimney painted blue for all interested men to see.
Meanwhile, the city is now home to a new gin distillery aptly name The Devil’s Half Acre Distillery. Its signature gin uses locally sourced juniper to flavor Jigger and Jones gin. The Jones is in reference to the brothel owner Fan Jones, while the Jigger is another local drinking legend. Albert Johnson, nicknamed Jigger, was a rowdy lumberjack type who would drink, fight, and wreak mayhem. The distillery draws on the mystique surrounding this era of excess in the otherwise quiet city to infuse some heritage into its local gin.
The Devil’s Half Acre is gone, burnt to the ground, but Bangor has not forgotten it. It is a curious notion, though, the Devil’s Half Acre; why does Lord of Hell only require half an acre as his worldly outpost? Vice, perhaps, is one of our most efficient uses of land. Bars and brothels have no quandaries about piling up on top of one another. Downtown drinking districts are often islands of midnight debauchery where drunk patrons can stumble short distances to further their inebriation. The rest of the streets are abandoned by the sleeping citizens.
Coolidge, Philip T. History of the Maine Woods. Furbush-Roberts, 1963.
“Getting Drunk in Maine.” Times-Picayune, 23 Apr. 1884, p. 3. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A1223BCE5B718A166%40EANX-1226D573918A20A8%402409290-1226334FF2A915F0%402-12492218F128D17F%40Getting%2BDrunk%2Bin%2BMaine. Accessed 29 Nov. 2022.
Goff, John H. “The Devil’s Half Acre.” The Georgia Review 9.3 (1955): 290-296.
Ives, Edward D. “The Boys of the Island: PI’s in the Maine Lumberwoods.” The Island Magazine 16 (1984): 28.
“Liquor Flows In Maine. Saloons Are Running In Full Blast at State’s Capital.” Augusta Chronicle, 12 Mar. 1909, p. 6. Readex: Readex AllSearch, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=ARDX&docref=image/v2%3A1252FEAF2D2D3A44%40EANX-127CEAFFE7FDC147%402418378-127CEAFFEBAE8E99%405-1380B27CE86E43EA%40Liquor%2BFlows%2BIn%2BMaine.%2BSaloons%2BAre%2BRunning%2BIn%2BFull%2BBlast%2Bat%2BState%2527s%2BCapital. Accessed 29 Nov. 2022.
Radio, W. L. B. Z. “History Spot, Bangor During Prohibition.” (1955).
Ring, Elizabeth. “Fannie Hardy Eckstorm: Maine Woods Historian.” New England Quarterly (1953): 45-64.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “View of the lumber industry.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 – 1930. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-245a-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Walker, Harold S. “The Bangor, Oldtown & Milford Railroad, 1836-1869.” The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin 106 (1962): 40-48.
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