This is the fifth installment in a limited series on Maine’s “quaint holdover,” the annual town meeting. This week we turn on the Wayback Machine and visit a Maine village about the time long hair and mustaches … the 1980s.

Dixfield is generally thought to be a sleepy community located near Rumford. There’s usually so little going on you don’t hear much about town. In fact, when the town decided on its motto (“The Only One”), they chose it because the only thing unique they could find about the town was, apparently, no other town in the US (or perhaps the world, we’re not sure) is named Dixfield. That was it.

But the winters are long in Dixfield. One especially brutal series of winter storms led to the town snowplow operator dumping excess snow onto a resident’s property. The resident, annoyed, pushed the snow back into the road, claiming it wasn’t “his snow.” It was the town’s and therefore the town’s problem.

At the next annual town meeting, a heated debate broke out where residents argued over whether snow, once plowed, belonged to the town because it fell on a town road, or the homeowner on whose property it was dumped. The ownership of the snow was never actually determined, but after considerable debate the meeting ultimately passed a “no returning plowed snow to public roads” ordinance, which remains in effect today in Dixfield, and is also a model for other towns in Maine.