The river's staggering stench in days past defied description, though many tried in newspapers, politics and even poetry.

A quick overview of the river that made the growth of Lewiston and Auburn possible.

The river is the cleanest it's been in more than a century.

The high point of the trial, without a doubt, occurred just before Maine Attorney General Harris Plaisted called Thomas Dwight, an anatomy professor at Bowdoin College who became the father of forensic anthropology, to take the stand.

Eben Pillsbury, an attorney for accused killer James M. “Jim” Lowell, had suggested the visit, telling the judge that in seeing the spot, jurors “might better understand its surroundings.”

After crews dynamited a rock formation at Lewiston Falls in 1899, it began to succumb to the Androscoggin River it once overlooked.

Each man who passed muster and was seated on the jury swore an oath “to well and truly try and true deliverance make” a decision based on the evidence presented.

A century ago, the paper endorsed involuntary sterilization and flirted with murder in a quest to rid humanity of "feeble-minded" people.

Beyond proving the identity of the remains, prosecutors needed to do two more things: establish that James "Jim" Lowell could well have killed Lizzie Lowell and that he had the opportunity to do so.

Through the legal proceedings, Lizzie Lowell emerged as the buyer of a dress and a woman with fast friends and perhaps loose morals, at least by the standards of the time.

The Lewiston Evening Journal loved the lively new sport when it arrived at Bates College soon after its invention.

Always state contenders, the Blue Devils didn't win more than two state titles in a row until their four-year run in the mid-1970s.

The team took three state titles over a five-year period starting in 1979.

At least two New Engand baseball teams after the Civil War were named after the KKK, including one in Bangor

The Red Eddies won a team, singles and doubles state title during a four-year span in the late 1970s and early '80s.

The Lisbon-born pugilist spent 15 years in the ring and was one fight away from getting a shot at a world title.

Many players took on big roles over the four-year run by the Panthers, culminating in a New England championship and three Class A titles.

Only one other school has joined Dirigo as winners of three consecutive Class C titles in field hockey — Dexter, which won four straight from 2000-03.

Maine’s attorney general, Harris Plaisted, had ventured from Bangor to Lewiston at New Year’s to work on the case. He intended, as everyone expected, to prosecute the case himself.

With the inquest completed that concluded the skeleton found off Switzerland Road was likely the missing Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie” Lowell, her husband next faced a preliminary examination on a murder charge before Judge Albion Knowlton that was supposed to take place in the Police Courtroom in the City Building’s basement.

It struck everyone as more than a little suspicious that a letter purporting to come from Lizzie was so chock full of help for the things her husband wanted, including, apparently, Jennie Blood.

The Lewiston Evening Journal said at the time the meeting between James Lowell and his former mother-in-law “was evidently not a pleasant one for the prisoner. He was a good deal agitated when the silk dress was carried in with them, was shown to him for the first time.”

The lack of electrical power for almost a week in Lewiston-Auburn closed businesses, shut schools and prompted linemen from across the country to assist in restoring power.

A stove explosion was blamed for the deadly fire at the 'baby farm.'

Among the worst years for flooding were 1896, 1936 and 1987.

Nine out of 10 known victims were male, often boys, and about half of those killed in the river were 18 or younger.

Their first decision was to bar the crowd outside from squeezing into the room, keeping those inside to a minimum — the coroner, Androscoggin County Attorney George Wing, the witnesses and the press. It seems that Frank Dingley, the Lewiston Evening Journal’s intrepid editor, was always allowed to see whatever he wanted.

'The high blaze jumped from building to building, almost burning them flat before the tenants knew what was going on,' reported the Evening Journal.

"I was covering a hearing in a murder case in Oxford County Superior Court in Paris one afternoon and the defendant referred to himself as a “sacrificial lamb.” Shortly after ... a very tall, blonde, Viking-type fellow in a white tank top shirt came to my desk ... and put a small brown cardboard box on my desk and left. Nothing said. I foolishly opened it. ..."

James Lowell served in Company G, which never saw active fighting, but didn’t have it easy. Among the places its men guarded were the Seneca Quarries in western Maryland, where the stone for the original Smithsonian building came from.

Interest in the case ran so high that when copies of the Journal began rolling off the press, hordes waited outside the building for a chance to buy one for 2 cents. Some stood patiently for hours since the editor declared that subscribers would get their papers first.

Arriving at the jail, the city marshal told James M. Lowell he’d get the best accommodations possible and brought him to the northwestern corner cell, where the local newspaper editor noticed that the bones collected on Switzerland Road — thought to be the remains of Lowell’s wife — were still bound up in a mat in the corner, some of them protruding into the air.

After James Lowell stepped down off a wagon, where he was loading rags at the Munroe’s Paper Mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, Officer E.D. Wiggin of Lewiston handed him a copy of that day’s Boston Journal, which carried an account of the discovery of the headless skeleton in Lewiston.

It's official. The government says we're spending too much time on the phone.

Lewiston and Auburn residents were happy to ride rather than walk on muddy, manure-filled streets.

While constantly plugging new connections into the switchboard in front of them and timing long-distance calls, the two operators at the Bryant Pond Telephone Co. must also be authorities on all kinds of local information.

'Bicycle fever' reached Lewiston in 1879, according to the Lewiston Evening Journal, and would go on to shake, rattle and roll into everyday life.

'The lure of high-tech, touch-tone and total privacy won out in a two-year battle with nostalgia and the human element,' announced the Sunday Sun Journal. 'The crank phone is dead. Long live call forwarding.'

Lewiston installed its first phone line just a year after Alexander Graham Bell received his patent for the telephone in 1876.

The turnpike is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year as the nation's second "superhighway" and world's first asphalt highway, helping make Maine a true 'vacationland.'

Though the dream had no impact on the discovery of the skeleton, it likely contributed to the stir caused by the find in a spot eerily similar to what Sarah Burton imagined.

From trains to trolleys, rail lines once tied the Twin Cities to the world.

In the first hours after the grisly discovery of a body in the woods, the Journal tracked down a few people who remembered Lizzie and her husband, James M. Lowell.

When the Lewiston Evening Journal reported the skeleton of a woman had been found near the Switzerland Road, women in town “said with one accord: ‘I think that’s Mrs. Lowell’s remains.’”

The continuing story of Maine's most spectacular murder case.

In the fall of 1873, a Lewiston woodcutter stumbled upon a headless skeleton and a tattered black dress lying beside some pine trees near the city’s most romantic drive. This series, published in weekly chapters on Sundays, tells the story.

Let’s go back in time to a crisp Wednesday in mid-October of 1873, beside a small clump of pine trees along the most romantic drive in Lewiston, a mile away from anyone’s home.

The real inventor of the Skycycle flew one over Lewiston 18 months before Arthur Wallace Barnard took flight in Tennessee

"A Newsman Who Is Not A Sportswriter Ordinarily Finds Fights ‘Smell Bad,’" from the May 7, 1965, edition of the Lewiston Evening Journal.

"'The Fight' Will Be Argued About For Many Weeks," by Lewiston Evening Journal Sports Editor Norman S. Thomas, as it appeared in the May 26, 1965, edition of the newspaper.

Frank Dingley, who died in 1918, was Lewiston's longest-serving and most influential editor.

A history of the newspaper in Lewiston from 1847 to the present