He was so rich he printed his own money, and started his own Maine town
Gen. Samuel Veazie was the original lumber baron
At just over three square miles, the town of Veazie is the second-smallest municipality by area in mainland Maine; only Randolph, in Kennebec County, is smaller. Towns like Monhegan and Matinicus are smaller still, but that makes sense, given the fact they are islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Not a lot of room for growth.
There’s a reason this odd little slice of land wedged in between Bangor and Orono is its own town, despite being unusually small for a Maine municipality: because a brash, unyielding local businessman decided he didn’t want to pay Bangor’s high taxes, and started his own town.
Calling Gen. Samuel Veazie a colorful character doesn’t fully encapsulate the effect the Portland-born lumber baron and entrepreneur had on the Bangor area. Between his virtual monopoly on lumber processing in the Bangor region, owning his own bank and later operating the first-ever railroad in Maine, there’s not a lot that Veazie’s endeavors didn’t have an economic impact on in the mid-19th century in Bangor. Before people began to catch on in the 1870s and 80s that obscenely wealthy and ruthless industrialists might not have their best interests in mind, Gen. Veazie was Bangor’s original captain of industry.
Veazie, born in 1787 in Portland, was a striver from a very early age. He first worked in shipping and tobacco manufacturing before landing on the industry that would make him his fortune: lumber. He was just 24 years old when he bought a boom pier in the Androscoggin River near Topsham, a crucial stop point for the logs being sent down the river to be shipped and processed. His lumbering career paused for a few years as Veazie entered the military during the War of 1812, from which he emerged in 1820 with the rank of general.
He relocated to the Bangor region, and in the 1820s began amassing lumber mills along the Penobscot River, coming to own more than 80 mills in Bangor, Orono and Old Town over the course of his life. He then bought up the boom piers and wharfs in the river, eventually owning most of those as well. By the end of the 1830s, Veazie owned a large majority of the lumbering infrastructure in the region, and operated the boom piers in particular with such strictness that, according to a 2003 report on the history of the town of Veazie, the Maine legislature actually forced him to share management of those piers with other lumbermen in the area, in order to level the playing field.
Though he chafed at being told what to do by the government, it didn’t end up mattering too much to Veazie; at the time, Bangor was the largest lumber shipping port in the world, and Veazie was the most successful lumberman of them all. He was fabulously wealthy, and almost certainly the richest man in Maine.
The term “lumber baron” was retroactively applied to people like Veazie, after journalists in the 1870s coined the name “robber baron” for Gilded Age businessmen like Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.P. Morgan who became outrageously wealthy even as they exploited their workers. Though Veazie’s heyday was a few decades before the excesses of the Gilded Age, his business practices were in keeping with that later era - especially in his later expansion into other industries besides lumber.
For instance: in 1834, Veazie purchased the Bank of Bangor, the largest bank in eastern Maine. In that era, many banks issued their own private currency; the practice, known as “wildcat banking,” was common in smaller cities and rural areas, and was especially common in New England. It was highly risky: if the bank went under, your money was worthless.
Within a few years of purchasing it, Veazie had changed the Bangor Bank’s name to the Veazie Bank, and was issuing paper currency with his own face on it, which for a time was the most popular choice for cash money in the region. When federal laws changed in 1864 and the government charged a 10 percent tax on currency issued by private banks, Veazie protested it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, though he ultimately lost.
In the 1850s, Veazie invested in a booming new industry: railroads. The first-ever railroad in Maine was the Bangor, Old Town and Milford Railroad, or the BO&M, which opened in 1836 and ran, as the name suggests, about 12 miles between Bangor and Milford. Among its initial owners were Ira Wadleigh and Amos Roberts - fellow lumbermen in the Bangor area, and Veazie’s chief rivals in Maine. It was Wadleigh and Roberts with whom Veazie had to share management of his boom piers, per the state legislature. They were not friends.
In 1853, Veazie filed a series of lawsuits against the railroad’s owners, in an attempt to force them to sell him the railroad. He was successful, and in 1854, the BO&M was sold to Veazie. The Veazie Railroad ran for another 15 years and was extended northward a few times before it was purchased by a national railroad company in 1869 and was dismantled.
Around the same time, Gen. Veazie embarked on what would end up being his most well-known gambit: the founding of the town that bears his name. What is now the town of Veazie was first known as North Bangor, and was a mostly rural part of the city of Bangor. It also was home to a number of Gen. Veazie’s most profitable sawmills and boom piers, and Veazie himself owned a large amount of property in the area.
Gen. Veazie decided he was done with paying Bangor’s high property taxes. What was the point in paying for schools, for policing, for road maintenance when Veazie and his new town’s residents could just do it themselves - or not do it at all, in the case of schools. The Maine legislature approved the separation of North Bangor from Bangor in March 1853, and in June of that year, 135 out of 138 voters in the new town approved a charter, and the naming of their municipality as Veazie, after its most rich and famous resident.
Gen. Veazie treated the new town a bit like his own personal fiefdom. As the town treasurer, he gave himself enormous tax breaks, and given that he was by far the town’s largest employer - the general owned all the town’s saw mills and boom piers - Veazie the man and Veazie the town were synonymous. Until the early 19th century, company towns - municipalities owned by big companies, often in the steel, mining or oil industries - were commonplace all across the country. Today, only six remain, including Starbase, Texas, which was founded by Elon Musk and other employees of his company SpaceX in May of this year.
When Gen. Veazie died in 1868, it didn’t take long for the town of Veazie to move on from its founder’s control. There was an attempt to have Veazie rejoin the city of Bangor, though that proposal failed. In the 1870s and 80s, most of the mills and piers owned by the Veazie family were sold, and by the 1890s, Maine’s lumber boom was well into its decline. And those low taxes that Gen. Veazie had so eagerly enacted during the 1850s and 60s began to rise, as townsfolk decided they did, in fact, want sidewalks and public safety and schools.
Ironically, Gen. Veazie is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor - a piece of land originally included in the town charter as part of the town of Veazie, but which eventually was deeded back to Bangor. Ruthless capitalist and tax dodger though he was, Gen. Veazie’s influence can still be seen all over the area - from the walking and biking trail that sits today atop the Veazie railbed, to the look and landscape of the Penobscot River waterfront in Bangor, to the tiny town that still bears his name today.
I would watch this biopic.
Thank you for the history lesson. should be taught in local schools