[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 7]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 10305-10306]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




      IN RECOGNITION OF THE BOROUGH OF BANGOR'S 140TH ANNIVERSARY

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                          HON. MATT CARTWRIGHT

                            of pennsylvania

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 23, 2015

  Mr. CARTWRIGHT. Mr. Speaker, I rise to celebrate the 140th 
anniversary of the Borough of Bangor, located in Northampton County, 
Pennsylvania, and its listing on the National Register of Historic 
Places.
  The area now known as Bangor, PA was settled in 1735. It was first 
named Uttsville after Adam Utt, one of the area's first hotel builders. 
In 1855, the name was changed to New Village. Slate was discovered in 
1856. Robert M. Jones, from Bethesda, Wales, founded the slate 
industry, and the first quarry opened in 1863. Bangor was incorporated 
as a borough on May 5, 1875. At that time, the population was 1,500. It 
was and is the core community in what came to be known as the Slate 
Belt region of Northampton County. At

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its height, Bangor's slate was known as the finest in the world, and 
Bangor was home to over seven major hotels.
  In the mid-1990s, a group of Bangor residents sought to preserve the 
borough's historical assets to secure its future vitality. In 2007, 
Bangor's Borough Business Revitalization Program joined a regional Main 
Street Program to foster the image of Bangor's traditional assets. The 
program later evolved into the Slate Belt Community Partnership, which 
continued the work. The National Register of Historic Places listing 
was approved in late 2014. Its focus is the slate extraction industry 
and the ethnic groups it attracted to Bangor from 1866-1940.
  I offer congratulations to the residents of Bangor for fulfilling 
their vision of a preserved Historic District. I applaud their 
dedication to history and to their community.




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