Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Bangor, ME

Bangor is the county seat and largest city of Penobscot County, Maine, and with a population of 31,753 in the 2020 census it is the third-most populous city in Maine, behind Portland and Lewiston.

European settlement began in 1769 when Jacob Buswell founded a community at the future site of Bangor, which was incorporated as Kenduskeag Plantation in 1791, as a town on February 12, 1834, and as a city on March 26, 1853.

The Penobscot people have inhabited the area around present-day Bangor for at least 11,000 years and traditionally called it kkàtaskkik, meaning at or on the water parsnip ground, which colonists rendered as Kenduskeag.

Bangor took its name from a Welsh hymn tune, and it shares the name with Bangor in Wales, where bangor in Old Welsh means wattled enclosure.

By 1860 Bangor had become the world's largest lumber port, operating 150 sawmills and shipping over 150 million board feet of lumber a year, with 3,300 lumber ships passing through its docks in 1860 alone.

The prosperity of the lumber trade built the elaborate Greek Revival and Victorian mansions of the Broadway Historic District and gave Bangor its nickname, the Queen City of the East.

The Great Fire of 1911 destroyed Bangor's high school, post office, public library, banks, six churches, a synagogue, nearly 100 businesses and 285 private residences across 55 acres, and the rebuilt area is now the Great Fire of 1911 Historic District.

As of the 2020 census Bangor had 14,607 households and 15,900 housing units, and the median age of its residents was 39.8 years.

Bangor International Airport, which also hosts the Bangor Air National Guard Base and its 101st Air Refueling Wing, was historically an important stopover on the Great Circle air route between the United States East Coast and Europe.

A 31-foot-high statue of the mythical lumberman Paul Bunyan stands in Bangor, and the bow plate of the battleship USS Maine survives on a granite memorial in Davenport Park.