Sara and the Red-Tops

Sara and the Red-Tops were a shifting Black musical group that settled at Tidwell's Meadow around the turn of the twentieth century and performed across western Maine. Their music brought them local popularity, but that welcome did not protect them from racism: after Sara and her son were murdered, harassment scattered the community, and the town's histories left the violence unrecorded.

Identity and Settlement

More than forty Black people settled in the area around 1900, according to local historical accounts. Most were related, many were talented, and a number performed with the group, first known as The Red-Top Boys and later as Sara Tidwell and the Red-Top Boys. The membership was fluid, sometimes including a woman among the performers, so the act's name and composition shifted from one performance to another.

Son Tidwell negotiated the purchase of Tidwell's Meadow and a substantial tract of lakeside land from Douglas Day. The money had reportedly been saved over ten years. The land purchase made the group and their extended family residents, not merely touring visitors, and their settlement took a form different from the shanty town some townspeople had expected: neat white cabins stood around a larger building that may have served as a meeting place, rehearsal space, or performance hall.

That arrival had prompted a protest meeting, whose language treated the settlers as an unwanted mass. Later, local acceptance was expressed in terms of separation and self-sufficiency: they paid their bills, kept to themselves, and did not take charity. The phrases could pass as praise, but they also marked the limits of the welcome. The group might be tolerated as neighbors so long as it was imagined as contained and dependent on no claim to broader belonging.

Performances and Public Image

For more than a year, perhaps nearly two, Sara and the Red-Tops played throughout western Maine, in places including Farmington, Skowhegan, Bridgton, Gates Falls, Castle Rock, Morton, and Fryeburg. Old posters remained in circulation long afterward, and the act was remembered as a favorite on the regional circuit. Sara's authorship of "Fishin Blues" is another measure of the group's musical reach: the song, originally performed by Sara and the Red-Top Boys, was later covered by performers ranging from Ma Rainey to the Lovin' Spoonful.

The song's suggestive double meanings formed part of Sara's performance repertoire. At a later Castle Rock scene, a young guitarist plays it before another act's music cuts him off. In the time-slip at the Fryeburg Fair, Mike hears the Red-Tops perform the number in a different historical setting. There it sounds neither quaint nor safely preserved as folklore: Sara is singing a popular, sexually suggestive song to a crowd that responds directly to her. The contrast between these performances shows how easily a living act can be reduced to a dated curiosity when removed from its original force and context.

The group's public reception was also shaped by racist descriptions. Newspaper clippings remembered them as "our Southern blackbirds" and "our rhythmic darkies," while Sara was described through racialized language that framed her as an exotic spectacle. These were presented as favorable reviews, but their genial tone did not make them neutral. They praised the performers while fixing them within stereotypes, making public popularity compatible with social inequality.

Race, Belonging, and Conflict

The group could be welcomed as entertainers while remaining vulnerable as Black residents. At Warrington's, Sara and her brother were invited to perform and treated to food and drink. Jared Devore's resentment, as later recounted, was not simply that the group had gained renown or visited a resort. What disturbed him was the possibility of Black people being received as social equals, sharing a meal with white people and moving through public space without accepting the limits he wanted to impose.

That conflict centered in part on The Street, the common route along the lake. Sara continued to walk there in her white dress, sometimes with her son, despite being warned to stay away. Her presence challenged the racial boundary Devore sought to enforce. Mike's account of how local people actually interacted with her complicates Devore's version of events: people spoke with Sara about ordinary concerns, women showed her their babies and sought her advice, and children responded to her laughter. The scene presents a community capable of everyday human contact even as its power structure sought to deny Sara equal standing.

The distance between apparent goodwill and dependable protection becomes clearest after Sara and her son disappeared. By September 1901, when the Red-Tops played their last Castle County show, many people on the TR knew they had been murdered, and many had a strong idea who was responsible. Yet, when events turned against the group, the local community closed ranks rather than securing justice. As Frank puts it, people protect their own and keep their dirty laundry behind closed doors. The earlier language of neighborliness and peaceful coexistence had not overcome that allegiance.

Dispersal and Erasure

Harassment of the Tidwell community began by Labor Day, according to Royce Merrill's account in Jo's notes, and worsened over time. Some members left for safer or friendlier places. Son Tidwell remained with his blood relatives in the meadow because he wanted to learn what had happened to his sister and nephew. His choice to stay was tied to the search for them, not to confidence that the town would help.

By the time of the Castle County Fair, the settlement had begun to break up. Son had been seeking help first to find Sara and her son alive, then to locate their bodies, and finally to find their killers. The community's initial sympathy did not hold when the consequences became serious. The group's last local performance thus belongs to a history of dispersal and abandonment, rather than a simple end to a successful touring season.

The surviving town histories offered no account of the circumstances in which the Red-Tops left. Jo's notes preserved a more troubling record of harassment and of what happened after the murders. This difference between official silence and private investigation makes the group's history an argument about memory as well as music: the performers were visible enough to be advertised and praised, but the violence against them could disappear from the public record.

Later History and Significance

At some point, Sara Tidwell became known as Sara Laughs, a name that endured in the region. The group's cabins remained after its departure and provided summer-rental income for the Day family. They burned in 1933, in fires that scorched the eastern and northern sides of the lake. The physical settlement vanished, while the name associated with Sara and the group's music remained attached to the place.

The Red-Tops' history links Black artistic achievement and local popularity to the instability of racial acceptance. They could perform for white audiences, earn admiration, and live beside the lake, yet those forms of recognition offered little protection when conflict exposed the community's boundaries. Their story also supplies the buried historical context behind the later investigation: what appears in the public record as a vanished musical group is, in Jo's notes and the surviving recollections, a community whose departure followed harassment and whose murdered members were not given justice.