Have you seen this bird bath fountain near the Thomas Hill Standpipe? I went by the standpipe to get a photo of one of Bangor's most iconic landmarks and just happened to glance across the way to find this little gem.

Townsquare Media Bangor, Sarah Nickerson
Townsquare Media Bangor, Sarah Nickerson
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Tucked away in the park across from the standpipe is the memorial for someone named Florence Bragg Buzzell. The inscription for the memorial reads: "In memory of its founder Florence Bragg Buzzell. Erected in 1922 by the Bird Conservation Club."

The memorial has a base of stone surrounded by grass. Surrounding the patch of grass is an array of patterns created by brick.

As you can see, the memorial isn't that far away from Bangor's Thomas Hill Standpipe. The memorial can be seen from the road between the Standpipe and the fountain memorial but, you can understand why people would miss it. It's set back a ways off of the road and close to some brush and trees in a little park across from the large, looming Standpipe.

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After doing some online sleuthing, I found that this monument is actually kind of a big deal, especially for women of the Bangor area who may appreciate the progressive group of ladies that ushered this piece into being.

A publication called The Guide To Nature, the June, 1924 edition being held and digitized by the University of Chicago featured an excerpt about this fountain. It gave a lot of information about the Bangor roots involved with creating and erecting the monument which included master workers and nature-centered, progressive women of the roaring twenties here in Maine including Charles Tefft, a Bangor native who became a renowned sculptor in New York and the stonework of Bangor-based Fletcher & Butterfield.

Townsquare Media Bangor, Sarah Nickerson
Townsquare Media Bangor, Sarah Nickerson
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The group who erected the statue have ties into other progressive women including the woman who started a science department at the University of Maine in the 1920s. A woman. A scholarly woman. A scholarly woman of science. Take that all in and think about the era she lived in. Incredible.

The fountain was not working when I visited it last week. You can see there is a stone askew from the base of the monument, which looks to be an access door to the fountain under workings. It looks as if someone was poking around in there but the fountain was not working when I was there. Maybe it hasn't worked in a long while.

It's cool to see the details of this nearly 100-year-old monument. It would be nice to see it working to continue the legacy of a Bangor woman and the group of ladies and skilled workers who were were passionate about the nature of Bangor, the talent of Bangor and all of them who would probably appreciate the bird watching that could be continued to this day.

Check out more details from the time it was installed in the gallery below and go visit this long lost piece of Bangor history across from the Thomas Hill Standpipe.

Bangor Memorial Fountain That You May Not Know Exists

This Bangor monument is easy to miss but was a hard earned symbol of progressive women in the Bangor region as well as a showcase for the master talents of Bangor.

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