The injury and death of Reg Tidwell Jr., followed by the departure of Son Tidwell’s family and the breakup of the Red-Tops community, expose the continuing persecution surrounding Sara Tidwell and her son’s murders. Reconstructed from Jo Noonan’s notes and Royce Merrill’s account rather than the town histories, the episode links a concealed trap on a familiar woodland route to a community’s eventual dispersal from the lakeside meadow.

Background and Recovered Account

Jo’s notes concentrated on this part of the history because it was where her investigation began. Royce Merrill knew the story well, and his account supplied details absent from the official town histories. By September 1901, when the Red-Tops played their last show in Castle County, nearly everyone around the TR knew that Sara and her boy had been murdered, and many had a good idea who was responsible. The public performance and the community’s knowledge thus stood side by side with an official record that did not preserve the same account.

Reg Tidwell spent much of August pressing County Sheriff Nehemiah Bannerman to act. At first he wanted a search mounted to find Sara and her son alive. Once he accepted that they were dead, he sought their bodies and then their killers; he did not doubt that they had been murdered. His persistence is the immediate background to the danger that followed: the family was seeking answers in a place where the murders were widely understood but not openly addressed in town histories.

Harassment and the Trap

By the time the Red-Tops played the Castle County Fair, the small community beside the lake had begun to break up. According to Royce’s account to Jo, active harassment began by Labor Day and grew uglier and more frightening each day. Son Tidwell refused to leave before learning what had happened to his sister and nephew, and he apparently kept his blood relatives in the meadow even after other members of the group moved to places they considered friendlier.

The trap was placed on a path through the woods about a mile east of what later became known as Tidwell’s Meadow. At its center, the clearing contained a large birch cross. Black residents held services there after local churches closed their doors to them; Reg, known as Junior, often went there to pray or sit quietly. People in the township knew the route he took. Someone concealed a leghold trap beneath leaves and needles on that narrow path.

The account does not identify who set it. It considers Jared Devore and his logging workers unlikely suspects because they avoided further contact with Sara and Son’s people after the murders, and it leaves open whether the trapper was associated with them at all. By then, the family had few allies. Royce’s account suggests that whoever set the trap may have intended to injure the boy rather than kill him, but the motive and identity remain uncertain; what is clear is that the trap was hidden along a route whose regular use was known.

Death and Departure

Reg stepped into the trap, and for a considerable time no one found him. The injury was followed by blood poisoning, and he died. The episode’s consequences extend beyond his death: Son gave up the search and the family’s effort to remain in the meadow. He had other children to consider, as well as the people who had stayed with them.

The group packed its clothes and guitars and left. Jo traced some of its members to North Carolina, where many of their descendants still lived. The separation was therefore both a local departure and a longer dispersal of a community whose history had already been largely excluded from the town’s written record.

Historical Consequences and Significance

The Red-Tops played their last Castle County show in September 1901, amid a community already breaking apart and after Reg’s death and the harassment described in Royce’s account. The episode connects the murder of Sara and her son to the subsequent pressure on the people who remained, showing that the danger did not end with those killings. Reg’s efforts to find his relatives and identify their killers were followed by a new loss that helped end Son’s attempt to stay.

Jo’s notes preserve a counter-history: the birch-cross clearing, the church closures that made it a place of worship, the route Reg habitually followed, the concealed trap, and the family’s eventual departure. The later fires of 1933, set by the young Max Devore, burned the cabins flat. That destruction compounded the community’s earlier displacement, leaving Jo’s recovered account to carry details missing from the town histories.