Evidence of this is still visible in the lumber barons' elaborate Greek Revival and Victorian mansions and the 31-foot-high (9.4 m) statue of Paul Bunyan.

Six cannons were removed from the riverbed, five of which are on display throughout the region (one was thrown back into the river by area residents angered that the archeological site was destroyed for the bridge's construction).

In 1861, a mob ransacked the offices of the Democratic newspaper the Bangor Daily Union, threw the presses and other materials into the street and burned them.

A bridge connecting Bangor with Brewer is named for Joshua Chamberlain, the regiment's leader and one of eight Civil War soldiers from Penobscot County towns to receive the Medal of Honor.

The passion of the Aroostook War signaled the increasing role lumbering and logging played in the Maine economy, particularly in the state's central and eastern sections.

Bangor became for a time the largest lumber port in the world, and the site of furious land speculation that extended up the Penobscot River valley and beyond.

[18] Exports also included bricks, leather, and even ice (which was cut and stored in winter, then shipped to Boston, and even China, the West Indies and South America).

A new type of steam engine built there, named the "Endeavor", won a gold medal at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition of the American Institute in 1856.

As early as the 1870s, the city promoted a Halifax-to-New York railroad, via Bangor, as the quickest connection between North America and Europe (when combined with steamship service between Britain and Halifax).

A European and North American Railway opened through Bangor, with President Ulysses S. Grant officiating at the inauguration, but commerce never lived up to the potential.

The destruction of downtown landmarks such as the old city hall and train station in the late 1960s urban renewal program is now considered to have been a mistake.

Though no people died and the city recovered quickly, the 1846 and 1902 ice jam floods were economically devastating, according to the Army Corps analysis.

The United States Coast Guard began icebreaker operations on the Penobscot in the 1940s, preventing the formation of frozen ice jams during the winter and providing an unobstructed path for ice-out in the spring.

[36] Bangor has a humid continental climate (Köppen: Dfb), with cold, snowy winters, and warm summers, and is in USDA hardiness zone 5a.

Bangor Raceway at the Bass Park Civic Center and Auditorium offers live, pari-mutuel harness racing from May through July and then briefly in the fall.

In 2007, construction began on a $131-million casino complex in Bangor that houses, among other things, a gaming floor with about 1,000 slot machines, an off-track betting center, a seven-story hotel, and a four-level parking garage.

With the end of the Cold War, the facility's mission of guarding against a Soviet air attack became superfluous, and though it briefly turned its attention toward drug interdiction, the system was decommissioned in 1997 as the SSPARS system installation—the successor to the PAVE PAWS installation—in Massachusetts' Cape Cod Air Force Station reservation fully took over.

Some notable architecture: The bow-plate of the battleship USS Maine, whose destruction in Havana, Cuba, presaged the start of the Spanish–American War, survives on a granite memorial by Charles Eugene Tefft in Davenport Park.

The abstract aluminum sculpture "Continuity of Community" (1969) on the Bangor Waterfront, formerly in West Market Square, is by the Castine sculptor Clark Battle Fitz-Gerald.

A 1962 bronze commemorating the 2nd Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment by Wisconsin sculptor Owen Vernon Shaffer stands at the entrance to Mount Hope Cemetery.

In 2013, the City of Bangor also signed an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court calling for the federal Defense of Marriage Act to be struck down.

[64] The arrival of Irish immigrants from nearby Canada beginning in the 1830s, and their competition with locals for jobs, sparked a deadly sectarian riot in 1833 that lasted for days and had to be put down by militia.

[67] In 1913, the war of the "drys" (prohibitionists) on "wet" Bangor escalated when the Penobscot County Sheriff was impeached and removed by the Maine Legislature for not enforcing anti-liquor laws.

FBI agents ambushed Brady, Shaffer, and James Dalhover on Bangor's Central Street after they had attempted to purchase a Thompson submachine gun from Dakin's Sporting Goods downtown.

Maine Public Broadcasting Network outlet WMEB 12, licensed to nearby Orono, is the area's PBS member station.

WHSN is a non-commercial alternative rock station licensed to Bangor and run and operated by staff and students at the New England School of Communications on the campus of Husson University.

Concord Coach Lines connects Bangor with Augusta, Portland, several towns in Maine's midcoast region, and Boston, Massachusetts.

Bangor is the last (or first) American airport along the great circle route between the U.S. East Coast and Europe, and in the 1970s and '80s it was a refuelling stop, until the development of longer-range jets in the 1990s.

The 1960s television gothic soap opera Dark Shadows has some scenes set in Bangor, which was the nearest city to the mythical Collinsport.

The Canadian mockumentary series Trailer Park Boys features Bangor as the location of a model train convention in the season 7 episode "Friends of the Road".