Summer of 1901

Summer of 1901 is the season when Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops become a celebrated act in the Castle County area, while the hostility of Jared Devore and his followers turns their presence on the TR into a lethal danger. Recalled much later through local history, archival clippings, and the work of Jo Noonan, the summer joins public acceptance to private racial violence—and shows how a community can know the truth yet fail to act on it.

Settlement and Local Acceptance

At the turn of the century, more than forty Black people settled around what became known as Tidwell's Meadow. Most were related, many were talented, and several belonged to the musical group first called The Red-Top Boys and later Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. The family had saved for ten years before Son Tidwell negotiated the purchase of the meadow and adjoining lakeside land from Douglas Day. Their arrival prompted a protest meeting over the supposed threat of a Black settlement, but the feared shantytown did not appear: neat white cabins rose around a larger building that could serve as a gathering, rehearsal, or performance space.

The group played across western Maine for more than a year, perhaps close to two, and became popular on the regional circuit. The band’s membership could change from performance to performance, and Sara was sometimes joined by a Red-Top Girl. At home on the TR, the Tidwells and their associates seemed to live peaceably with their neighbors. That peace, however, rested on a narrow local standard: Black residents were regarded as acceptable so long as they paid their bills, kept apart, and did not accept charity. The outward calm did not mean that racial hierarchy had disappeared; it set the terms on which the community would tolerate the newcomers.

The family’s cabins and the community they had built were temporary. After playing a county fair or two in late summer 1901, the group left the area. Sara’s name remained attached to the place: at some point she became Sara Laughs, the name later associated with the site. The cabins continued to provide summer rental income to the Day family until the 1933 fires destroyed them. The community’s physical traces could be burned away, but the history of its brief settlement and violent aftermath remained embedded in local memory.

Jared Devore’s Campaign of Racial Hostility

By the time Sara and the Red-Tops settled in Castle County, Jared Devore was an elderly but still vigorous Civil War veteran. In the summer of 1901, he had a group of younger men around him, including Fred Dean, Harry Auster, Ben Merrill, Oren Peebles, George Armbruster, and Draper Finney. He repeatedly used racist slurs for Sara and her family, and framed their presence as a threat to community purity. His campaign was not simply a response to their success as musicians: what especially angered him was that they had been welcomed at Warrington's, where Sara and her brother were treated as guests and ate with white people.

Sara also refused the racial boundary Devore tried to impose on public space. Though warned to stay off The Street, the broad lakeside path, she continued walking there, sometimes with Kito. The narrator’s later reconstruction counters Devore’s claim that she had been wholly rejected: local men spoke with her about crops, women showed her their babies and asked her for advice, and children were given to her to hold. Devore’s grievance was that people treated Sara as a neighbor rather than turning away from her. Her ordinary presence, and the ease of those encounters, challenged the separation he sought to enforce.

The history is presented with an important distinction between documented public praise and concealed social contempt. Newspaper clippings describe the musicians in patronizing racial terms, praising their supposed good nature and describing Sara through racist stereotypes even while treating the reviews as favorable. Their popularity did not free them from the language of the period or make them safe. The clippings show that a community could applaud Black performers while continuing to view them through a demeaning racial lens.

The Attack and the Summer’s Turning Point

Sara valued the quiet of her walks along The Street, a contrast to her earlier years performing amid noisy crowds. On a Sunday afternoon in August, she walked south from the meadow without seeing anyone; Kito had gone elsewhere to pick berries. The township appeared deserted. Some residents were attending a church dedication or other gatherings, while the customary lakeside traffic had not yet returned. The empty path left Sara exposed at a moment when Devore and his followers had spent the summer preparing one another to regard her presence as a provocation.

When Devore encountered Sara, she laughed after he fell. The laugh, a familiar part of her public persona, became the immediate trigger for his attack. He struck at her and ordered the others not to let her call out; Ben Merrill and Oren Peebles joined him. The violence was collective, not an isolated confrontation between two people: Devore’s repeated racist exhortations had helped turn his younger companions into participants. The evidence establishes that Sara was raped and murdered and that Kito was drowned while she lay dying, though the assault itself is not necessary to reproduce in detail to understand the consequence of that organized hatred.

The episode also casts a shadow forward through the young men who took part. Draper Finney later died attempting to dive into Eades Quarry while drunk. The account describes the death as an accident that was, in a sense, partly deliberate, and connects his drinking to the memory of a hand appearing in the water. The summer’s violence thus did not end when the attackers left the scene: it persisted as a private torment for one of the participants, even as the wider community kept its silence.

Knowledge, Silence, and the Aftermath

By September 1901, when the Red-Tops played their last show in Castle County, almost everyone on the TR knew that Sara and her son had been murdered, and many had a good idea who was responsible. Reg Tidwell Jr. spent much of August pressing County Sheriff Nehemiah Bannerman for action—first to search for Sara and Kito alive, then to find their bodies, and finally to identify their killers. Once Reg accepted that they were dead, he did not doubt that they had been murdered. Bannerman was initially sympathetic, as were others, but sympathy did not prevent the killings or guarantee accountability.

The season’s history is recovered much later through material Jo Noonan gathered. Bill Dean explains that Jo’s interest in the case began with the story of the crying boy and that Royce Merrill knew it well. Yet the same local culture that preserved the story discouraged inquiry: Bill warns that the death of little Kerry Auster is not appropriate material for an article because people could still be hurt, and says that in small towns the past dies slowly. His account of Jo’s interest in Sara and the other newcomers is less certain; he never saw what she wrote, if she wrote anything at all. The record of the summer therefore arrives through fragments, recollections, and gaps rather than a settled public reckoning.

That fragmented form reinforces the contrast at the center of the season. The musicians’ arrival, successful performances, and apparent neighborliness were visible, while Devore’s racial campaign and the community’s knowledge of the murders became part of a more guarded history. The phrase that Sara and the others were merely wanderers from elsewhere conceals the more openly racist thought beneath it. Summer 1901 is consequently both a period in the history of the TR and the buried origin of the later haunting associated with Sara Laughs: the place remembers what its residents tried to treat as old, distant, or unfit to discuss.