CANTON — With temperatures hovering close to 100 degrees Friday afternoon, nearly 100 people attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new dam on Whitney Brook, an outlet of Lake Anasagunticook.

“What a great day and what an accomplishment,” Malcolm Ray of Canton, Dam Advisory Committee chairman, said. “This project is a big lesson. We can do a lot if we work together.”

Scott Kilbreth, who was a Canton selectman when the project started, presented Ray with a plaque of appreciation.

David Bowen, a former Hartford selectman, also spoke of the partnership required to complete the work.

“It took both Canton and Hartford and the Canton Water District to get the project done,” he said.

Hartford Board of Selectmen Chairman Lee Holman said Judy Hamilton of Hartford worked harder than anyone else in town on the project. Holman presented Hamilton with a certificate of appreciation from the board.

The ceremony was sponsored by the Lake Anasagunticook Association, which provided refreshments.

The celebration marks the completion of work begun when Canton took the property by eminent domain in July 2008. A state inspection on Dec. 4, 2006, deemed the dam a threat to public safety and ordered its sluice gates to be left open, Ray previously said.

When the sluice gates were ordered open in 2006, it dropped the level of Lake Anasagunticook considerably and riled its property owners, most of whom live in Hartford.

Hartford joined Canton in creating a joint Dam Advisory Committee, because the lake straddles both towns.

Town officials deemed it less expensive to build a new dam. The concrete gravity structure was completed in December 2011 at a cost of  about $700,000. It impounds about 4 feet of water.

Canton Water District operates the dam. The committee developed an interlocal agreement among Canton, Hartford, the Canton Water District and the Lake Anasagunticook Dam Commission, which was formed when the dam was completed.