The world’s 1st marketed chewing gum was made in Bangor

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Of all the things that Mainers have invented or mass-marketed — earmuffs, the machine gun, the microwave oven — perhaps none is as little recognized as chewing gum.

After all, it was in 1850 that Hampden native John Bacon Curtis first recognized that spruce gum, a treat derived from spruce tree sap and enjoyed by both Wabanaki people and Maine lumbermen, could potentially be a lucrative product if he marketed it correctly.

Today, brands like Trident, Icebreakers, Orbit, Bubblicious and DoubleMint are found on supermarket shelves all over the world. But in the 1850s, Curtis traveled from town to town and city to city, introducing the public to the entire concept of chewing gum — a Maine-made product that quickly caught on and made Curtis a fortune.

The idea of chewing gum reaches back thousands of years. Neolithic Europeans reportedly chewed on birch bark tar, while the Ancient Greeks chewed mastic gum, and the Mayans and Aztecs used chicle, a tropical tree gum, as both an adhesive and a chewing product.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous people, including the Wabanaki in what is now Maine and Maritime Canada, harvested the sap, or resin, from the widely abundant spruce trees and turned it into a chewy, sticky substance that could seal the seams of canoes, safely cover wounds and sores, and also served as a pleasurable thing to chew.

By the 18th century, European settlers were well established in what is now Maine, and the lumber industry had already begun to flourish, reaching its peak in the early part of the 19th century. As loggers harvested the seemingly endless supply of trees in the Maine woods, spruce resin was a natural byproduct. Having learned from the Wabanaki how to turn the sap into gum, spruce gum became popular with lumbermen across the northern U.S. and Canada.

Curtis was 21 years old in 1848 when he went to work in the woods, taking a job clearing trees and brush for roads in northern Maine. He picked up the habit of chewing spruce gum from his fellow lumbermen and began to wonder if there might be a business opportunity to produce, package and market spruce gum to confectioners.

Curtis and his father teamed up and asked loggers they knew to collect spruce sap and sell it to them. Over a stove in a storefront on Franklin Street in Bangor, in 1850 the father and son team cooked up their first batch of spruce gum, a relatively simple process that involves repeatedly heating and shaping spruce sap until it can be cut into small, chewable bites. Eventually, they would add sugar to the mix to enhance the astringent, piney flavor of spruce.

The younger Curtis began selling his gum, dubbed the State of Maine Spruce Gum or Yankee Spruce Gum, to confectioners and pharmacies statewide and, eventually, all over New England. It was a massive hit, and the elder Curtis frantically tried to keep up with demand, requesting more and more spruce sap from loggers, often buying it by the ton.

The younger Curtis expanded the business to western states, doggedly going store-to-store in cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago to sell the chewy novelty to more and more customers. Spruce gum even began to make its way overseas.

By 1858, demand had far outpaced the capacity of the little Bangor storefront, and that year the Curtis Company relocated to Portland, opening a chewing gum factory at 291 Fore St. The factory — today the site of Hub Furniture — at its peak employed around 200 people, mostly women, and manufactured both spruce gum and paraffin gum, made from the petroleum-derived paraffin wax. It produced gum until 1920, and many of the methods used in cutting and packaging the gum are still used today.

Between 1850 and 1870 Curtis made a fortune on chewing gum, and invested his money in a number of other industries, including mining and ranching. By the 1870s, he and his wife were living in a grand mansion in Portland, and regularly donated to charitable causes, including the construction of a library in his father’s hometown of Bradford.

Spruce gum was eventually overtaken in popularity by chicle-based gum, which first became commercially available in the U.S. in the 1870s, and which could be easily flavored by things like mint, licorice and fruit. By the 1890s, brands like Wrigley’s, Chiclets and Black Jack were by far the most popular gum varieties in the country, and Maine-made spruce gum returned to being a niche product, enjoyed mostly by locals with connections to the lumber industry.

Modern chewing gum wouldn’t exist in the way we know it if an enterprising young man from the Bangor area hadn’t come up with the idea to produce and sell spruce gum — a byproduct of Maine’s lumber industry, and a chewy treat enjoyed by the Wabanaki for centuries prior.

Emily Burnham is a Maine native and proud Bangorian, covering business, the arts, restaurants and the culture and history of the Bangor region. More by Emily Burnham