Two years before he would successfully run for president, my great-great grandfather, James A. Garfield, came to Maine to campaign for Republican candidates prior to the mid-term elections of 1878.

Until last week, I never knew that he ever set foot in Maine, let alone in Bangor, during his too-short life, tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet and an incompetent doctor two months before his 50^th birthday. But local historian Richard Shaw pointed me to a house on Broadway near its intersection with Cumberland Street, where the future president was a guest at a reception during what was likely his only visit to the city.

Travel was different in those days. The first Model T would not roll off Henry Ford’s assembly line for another thirty years. There were no interstate highways, of course, and few bridges across the rivers that divide Maine’s coast. And yet Congressman Garfield gave speeches in Portland, Lewiston, Damariscotta, Rockland, Camden and Belfast before arriving in Bangor on September 7, where he spoke at Norumbega Hall and stayed at the home of former Vice President Hannibal Hamlin.

All of this is documented in his diaries, the pertinent parts of which were shared with me by Todd Arrington, site manager at the James A. Garfield Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio, just east of Cleveland and a few miles south of Lake Erie. It was here that the Congressman and future President lived with his wife Lucretia and their five surviving children until moving into the White House in 1881.

Congressman Garfield left Mentor on the afternoon of Thursday, August 29, 1878, accompanied by his oldest son Harry (my great-grandfather), then 16 years old. They traveled by horse-drawn buggy to the nearby town of Plainesville, where the Congressman boarded a train at 3:36 p.m.

The train traveled along much the same route plied by Amtrak today, through Albany and western Massachusetts to Boston, where Garfield changed trains for Maine. By the evening of Friday the 30^th, he was in Portland. The trip did not take appreciably more time than a similar train trip does now.

Garfield spent several days in southern Maine, traveling by local train to give speeches in Lewiston and Biddeford and to swim in the surf at Old Orchard Beach. On Wednesday, September 4, he took a train to Damariscotta, gave another speech, spent the night at a hotel, and departed by train the next morning for Rockland.

Apparently he was much in demand as a speaker, a rising star in the Republican Party. He was driven overland via horse-drawn carriage to Camden and then Belfast, delivering speeches in both places before boarding a steamship that took him up the river to Bangor on the morning of Saturday, September 7.
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According to Cipperly Good, collections manager at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, a daily steamship ran between Rockland and Bangor, with stops in Camden, Northport, Belfast, and Searsport. “That’s how you moved around the coast in those days, between the major ports,” she said. A 1905 schedule shows a 7:30 departure from Belfast and an 11 a.m. arrival in Bangor, and Good suggested that the schedule in 1878 was probably similar. A typical steamer such as the Katahdin or the Cambridge would hold about 100 passengers, and make one trip each day in each direction.

Congressman Garfield remained in Bangor until Monday morning, when he boarded a train for Augusta. He arrived home in Ohio on Thursday morning, the 12^th, having been away just short of two weeks.

What strikes me about my great-great grandfather’s journey is that the automobile giveth, and the automobile taketh away. One can drive from Cleveland to Bangor in one long day, and from Rockland to Bangor in under two hours. The Concord Coach bus covers the same route as the old steamships, though still only once or twice a day, depending on the season, and with far fewer passengers.

Still, wouldn’t it be grand to take a passenger ferry up the Penobscot, or to arrive home in Bangor by train? Even 138 years ago, travelers had more options than they do today. Bangor was a hub for rail and steamboat routes, according to Matt Bishop, curator and operations manager at the Bangor Historical Society. “Lots was going on back then,” he said.

Perhaps, as we move from the Late Automobile Age to whatever comes next, people will remember that there’s more than one way to get there from here.

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I left San Diego in 1999, with two kids, a dog, a cat, an Aerostar van and a U-Haul trailer filled with our worldly possessions. I pointed the van east and never looked back. After 16 years in California, I moved back to Maine, where I grew up. I’ve been gone from San Diego now for as long as I lived there.

This week, I took a stroll around my old neighborhood.

“Normal Heights is a walking neighborhood,” I wrote in a parting piece published in San Diego Magazine. “I suppose that’s what I like best about it.”

It still is. When I returned to visit San Diego this week, I took my girlfriend on a short walking tour. We walked along Adams Avenue, the main drag, and over by the park and the elementary school my kids attended. We walked past my old house and out to the bluff overlooking Mission Valley. We stopped into the Normal Heights Community Center, where once upon a time I edited a small community newspaper called the Adams Avenue Post.

The newspaper is long gone, but the Adams Avenue Business Association is still headquartered there. After a few moments of hesitation, the man behind the desk and I recognized each other. It was Scott Kessler, the AABA’s executive director, with whom I had worked closely on the newspaper, the annual Adams Avenue Street Fair, and other local projects. Scott is once again directing the AABA after a ten-year hiatus to pursue other interests.

We had a bittersweet conversation about people who have died or moved away. But then he said, “The Avenue looks good, doesn’t it?”

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Normal Heights prepared me for the life I now enjoy in Bangor. I rented a house three blocks north of Adams Avenue and two blocks south of the edge of the bluff overlooking Mission Valley. I walked to my job and bicycled or bused to my classes at San Diego State University. The grocery store was within walking distance, too, and I developed the habit of what my son calls “European shopping” – buying smaller amounts of supplies on more frequent trips to the store.

I did have a car back then, but on many days it sat in the driveway. We used it to go to the beach, or up into the mountains or out to the desert, but much of our lives were conducted on foot. The kids walked to school, and the number 11 bus took me right to San Diego State on the rare days when the weather was too bad to bicycle.

Among the possessions packed into the U-Haul were several boxes of vinyl albums, many of them purchased at Nickelodeon Records, a used record store, run by Ruth Bible and Betsy Scarborough, tucked into an Adams Avenue storefront. When I lived in Normal Heights I amassed my second record collection. The first had been liquidated long ago. But I hauled the second one across the country, and have continued to add to it since.

The store is still there, amid many new and old businesses along the Avenue. I pulled a Warren Zevon album from the bargain box near the front of the store, and remarked that I used to shop here years ago. The two women looked at me a moment, and then one of them said, “Didn’t you have a dog? And two little kids? You used to sit out on the pavement and sift through the fifty-cent records.” I couldn’t believe they’d recognized me after all this time. Of course I bought a few albums. They’re shipping them to Maine so I don’t have to take them on the airplane.

Despite the improvements, Ruth and Betsy reported that Adams Avenue retains its funkiness. Though it’s no longer officially “blighted,” Normal Heights will never be entirely gentrified, and that’s a good thing.

It felt like a visit to a life that could have been. “I could stay if I wanted to,” I wrote in that 1999 magazine piece. “Someday, perhaps, I will find a place where I will truly immerse myself in a community and shed my fear of sinking roots. If it was going to happen anywhere in San Diego, it would have happened in Normal Heights.”

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