The Glorious Fourth of July, 1866 was planned as an elaborate celebration of Independence Day and the end of the war. Instead it brought Portland’s’ greatest disaster. A fire started in a boatyard on Commercial Street, possibly caused by a firecracker, spread to a lumberyard and then to John Bundy Brown’s huge sugar factory. The fire swept diagonally across the city from the Fore River to the shore of Back Cove on the north shore of the Neck. Eighteen hundred buildings burned, more than a quarter of Portland’s assessed valuation. Ten thousand people were homeless. Among the casualties were the Marine Society’s Room and records. Only the corporate seal and the ballot box, which happened to be at Secretary/Treasurer Thomas C. Stevens’s home outside the fire, survived, and are in use today.
Portland rebuilt once more and harbor improvements continued. In 1872 the Board of Trade succeeded in getting Congress to approve an appropriation for harbor dredging. In 1875 the Grand Trunk Railroad, which brought grain shipments from Canada, built a grain elevator over a hundred feet long on Gait’s Wharf. With a capacity of one hundred fifty thousand bushels, it could load a steamship on one side while loading two or more coasting vessels simultaneously. By the end of the eighties there was a weekly line of steamers running between Portland and Europe for six months each year while freighters ran to and from Glasgow in the winter. And in case there was too much congestion right at the dock, the Grand Trunk upgraded its facilities with another elevator with a capacity of over a million and a half bushels. At the turn of the century the Board of Trade Journal reported that the harbor had just been dredged to thirty feet at low tide in front of Gait, Franklin and Maine Wharves.
In 1869, faced with growing evidence of the decline of the American merchant marine, a congressional committee held hearings in a number of seaports, including Portland. One of those testifying was Captain Charles M. Davis, then president of the Marine Society, who said that he had been retired from the shipowning business for some time. "I built ships and owned some. I have not owned any ships since the war." Under questioning by Committee Chairman Lynch, Davis said that he felt that the United States was competitive in wooden shipbuilding but not in iron. He advocated allowing American shipowners to buy cheaper foreign-built iron vessels. Though such a view would not be popular in Bath, Maine today, Davis asked, "What difference does it make to the government when I am going to sail [them] under the American flag?"
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