The Captain

W.H. Bridges

It looks like Marion Bridges was the great family genealogist as the Franks, Webb and Woodruff side (hers) of the family are better recorded than the Bridges and Worcester side (WAB Sr.'s side).  However, she knew her father-in-law, "the Captain" Bill Bridges, and as such had a personal connection and reason to keep his photos and letters.  He also was something of a character and man about town in Bay City, Michigan and later in Syracuse, NY.

Willard Harrison Bridges was born in Glenburn, Maine on 11 May, 1840.  Glenburn was a newly incorporated town 8 miles north along the Kenduskeag River from Bangor, which at that time was a relatively large town of 8,600 people.  The Bridges family was one of the more prosperous land-owning farmers in the area.

Willard was a common first name at the time, and he probably received his middle name from William Henry Harrison, a war hero who was actively campaigning for (and subsequently won) the presidency in early 1840.  He was known as Bill to his family and friends, and he grew up in a house with his mother, father, grandmother and uncle, and was the oldest of 4 brothers and 2 sisters.  The family was able to send Bill and his siblings to school, though no doubt he also worked on the family farm as well.

In the mid-1800s Bangor styled itself the "lumber capital of the world" and at one time there were up to 400 mills in the area processing lumber floated down the Kenduskeag and Penobscot rivers.  By the age of 20, Bill was working in one of these mills and probably earning a decent wage given the insatiable demand for processed lumber in the gold mines and railways out west and in the Caribbean.

Bill Bridges and Annette Worcester
Bangor, Maine, 1867

This was a time of rapid development of the interior of the United States, and many mill owners and lumber men from Maine moved to Illinois and Michigan to set up mills.  Bay City, Michigan (and it's neighbor, Bangor, named for the town in Maine where many mill owners and workers originated), was a center of the lumber industry in the mid-west and was on the edge of the sheltered Saginaw Bay in Lake Huron.  Bay City was the transit and processing point for lumber coming in from the mid-west and Canada before being transferred by boat through the Erie Canal to New York and Montreal.

On 16 September 1867 in Bangor, Bill married Clara Annette Worster (Annette or Nettie), who was the daughter of an old and well known Maine family.  They likely met at Annette's older brother, George, who was a neighbour of the Bridges in Kenduskeag.  Shortly after their wedding, Bill and Annette headed west to Michigan to find greener pastures in the lumber and later the shipping business.
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Stay tuned for part 2.