April 24, 2013
Song: “Vahlsing Pollutes It”
Written by Sandy Ives
Collector: Andrea L’Hommedieu
Date: 8/27/2000
Town: Recorded in Bucksport, ME; events took place in East, ME area
The lyrics are transcribed from an interview conducted for The Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, Muskie Oral History Project #226 (MOH 226).
Fred H. Vahlsing, Jr. (c.1936–1991) was a successful businessman who made his fortune in Aroostook County’s cash crop: potatoes. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, he became the state’s most notorious environmental villain. The trouble started (well, really started as far as our story goes) when he began making promises of sugar beets as a second cash crop for the region. To quote a story in DownEast magazine, “Shady businessmen with big ideas are a dime a dozen in Maine history, but Vahlsing, with his cowboy hats, snakeskin boots, and private planes and helicopters, had a certain flair and swagger about him that made him easy to dislike when his promises of a second cash crop (after potatoes) for Aroostook County started to fall through amid defaulted loans and polluted streams.”
In short, Vahlsing built a potato processing plant in Easton in 1960 and five years later added a sugar beet plant next door. At the same time, he pushed for (and won) reclassification of Prestile Stream from Class B down to Class D, which essentially allowed him to use it as an open sewer.
Within a few years, so much filth – in the form of rotten potatoes and dead fish -was flowing downstream that angry Canadian residents gathered with bulldozers to dam the stream at the border. By 1972, Vahlsing had defaulted on thirty million dollars’ worth of state and federal loans, and politicians across the state were either running away from the former root vegetable magnate or apologizing for supporting him. (For a list, read the piece in DownEast.)
Pollution in the Prestile Stream was not on the scale of many places and events that spurred the environmental movement on the national level, but it was environmental degradation like this that spurred the environmental movement and the first celebration of Earth Day in 1970. Maybe we can think of Prestile Stream as Maine’s Cuyahoga River? Sandy Ives seemed to think it was important enough to write a song about it, and when he was visiting Orono for a performance at UMaine, Pete Seeger thought it was important. Sandy and Pete sang the song together at the concert, and Seeger and Don McLean included “Vahlsing Pollutes It” in a collection of songs called “Songs and Sketches of the first Clearwater Crew,” published in 1970.
More details on Vahlsing’s bad environmental record, questionable business practices, and the damage done to Prestile Stream are available in the sources and links included below. And more importantly, you can also find information on what is being done to repair the damage.
Lyrics (To the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”):
1.
Once an Aroostook farmer, sat by his potato patch,
Counting his pennies, one, two, three.
When along came Muskie, and told him of the sugar beet,
Saying Vahlsing will build it for you and for me.
Chorus:
Vahlsing will build it, Vahlsing will build it
Vahlsing will build it for you and for me.
And he sang as he talked of the sugar beet refinery,
Vahlsing will build it for you and for me.
2.
Down in Augusta, Vahlsing told the governor
There’s a little matter of Prestile Stream.
And the boys in the legislature sang as they declassified,
Vahlsing pollutes it for you and for me.
Vahlsing pollutes it, Vahlsing pollutes it,
Vahlsing pollutes it for you and for me.
And the boys in the legislature sang as they declassified,
Vahlsing pollutes it for you and for me.
3.
Oh the sugar beet refinery is going like a house afire,
Meanwhile the smell helps to keep Maine green.
And the folks down in Mars Hill and across the line in Centerville,
Say Vahlsing pollutes it for you and for me.
Vahlsing pollutes it, Vahlsing pollutes it,
Vahlsing pollutes it for you and for me.
We can grow sugar beets right in our new sewage plant,
Vahlsing pollutes it for you and for me.
—–
Sources: “Upper Prestile Stream Watershed-Based Management Plan” prepared by FB Environmental, July 2009 available online at www.caswcd.org/PDFs/Publications/Upper%20Prestile%20Stream%20WBMP_Draft_20July09%28final%29.pdf provides a brief historical overview and important science-y information; Vahlsing was included in a list of real-life Maine villains in Edgar Allen Beem, “Rogues, Rascals, & Villains,” DownEast. August 2008, available at www.downeast.com/magazine/2008/august/rogues-rascals-villains; and for a very thorough account from the time, see Graham, Frank Jr. “That Mess on the Prestile,” American Heritage Magazine Volume 21, 2 (February 1970), available online at www.americanheritage.com/content/mess-prestile.
Image Description: P 0540: Sandy Ives and Pete Seeger perform "Vahlsing Pollutes It" at the University of Maine
Image Description: P 0539: Sandy Ives and Pete Seeger perform "Vahlsing Pollutes It" at the University of Maine
