PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • July 9, 2020
July 9, 1968: A former mayor of Centerville, New Brunswick, organizes a group of his friends to create an earthen dam on Prestile Stream, causing its fetid, smelly water to rise across the border in Aroostook County, Maine. The highly publicized dam protest is one of the blows that kills a highly controversial, scandal-plagued effort by businessman Fred H. Vahlsing to establish a sugar beet refinery in the County. Vahlsing’s existing potato processing plant was dumping pollutants into the Prestile.