The Tidwell family settles by Dark Score Lake after purchasing Tidwell’s Meadow and a substantial stretch of lakeside land, establishing a community whose music and brief presence become part of the region’s history. Recalled by Michael Noonan while he investigates the meadow, the settlement is significant not only as the home of Sara Tidwell and her musical group, but as a record of how racial exclusion and local custom shaped the family’s welcome, its livelihood, and the town’s memory of its departure.

Purchase and settlement

At the turn of the century, more than forty Black people settled at the meadow, according to Marie Hingerman and a county history published in 1977. Most were related, and many were musicians. The group bought the meadow and a large tract of lakeside land from Douglas Day. Sonny Tidwell negotiated the purchase on behalf of the extended family; the money, according to his account, had been saved over ten years. As a Red-Top, Sonny played a style then called chickenscratch guitar.

The move brought the family into a place where their arrival had already provoked organized opposition. In 1900, when Sonny bought the land, the meadow was known as Day’s Hill. Town residents held a meeting to protest what they described as the arrival of Black people in a horde. The settlement that followed contradicted the feared image of a shanty town: neat white cabins were built around a larger structure that may have served as a meeting place, rehearsal room, or performance hall. The evidence leaves the building’s precise function uncertain, but its position at the center of the cabins suggests the importance of shared life and music to the settlement.

Music and conditional acceptance

The musical group first performed as The Red-Top Boys and later as Sara Tidwell and the Red-Top Boys. Its membership was fluid: sometimes a woman joined the band, and the lineup could change from one performance to the next. For more than a year, perhaps nearly two, the musicians played across western Maine, including Farmington, Skowhegan, Bridgton, Gates Falls, Castle Rock, Morton, and Fryeburg. Old posters from their shows still turned up at barn bazaars and junk shops when Michael was recalling their history.

Their regional popularity did not mean that racial prejudice had disappeared. Local accounts framed the performers through racist descriptions even when ostensibly praising them, presenting the group as quaint entertainment and Sara as an object of fascination. The reviews Michael later found show how public approval could coexist with demeaning language: the group could be welcomed as performers while still being reduced to racial caricature. That record complicates the appearance of an uncomplicatedly successful settlement.

At home, the family and their neighbors maintained what Michael describes as a miserly peace, governed by a local ethic that treated paying one’s bills, keeping apart, and not accepting charity as signs of respectability. This tolerance depended on separation and on the settlers’ ability to meet the community’s expectations; it did not undo the hostility that had greeted their purchase of the land. The settlement therefore occupies an uneasy place between exclusion and accommodation: the family owned property and became locally known, yet the surrounding social order continued to mark them as outsiders.

Sara, the meadow, and the town’s memory

At some point, Sara Tidwell became known as Sara Laughs. The account establishes the change in name without explaining exactly when or why it occurred. The meadow later carried both its family history and the ominous associations of Sara Laughs. When Michael walks the lane and stops at the field overlooking Dark Score Lake, the place draws him into a sense that ordinary reality is thin. The landscape is thus not merely a setting for the settlement’s history: in the present-day narrative, it becomes a threshold where the past feels close and unresolved.

That history is also filtered through the people who remember it. Marie Hingerman identifies the meadow as the site of the cabins, and Bill Dean confirms the location but shows little interest in discussing it further. Later, Bill calls Sara and the others wanderers from elsewhere, then hesitates over the more openly racist term that had first come to mind. His reluctance and his choice of euphemism expose the prejudice beneath the community’s habitual language of distance and local belonging. The town’s silence about the family is therefore part of the settlement’s afterlife, not evidence that its racial tensions were settled.

Departure and afterlife

The family did not remain at TR-90. After playing at one or two county fairs in the late summer of 1901, the group moved on. The evidence does not state why they left or where they went, so their departure remains a gap in the local record rather than a fully explained decision. The cabins, however, continued to have a material afterlife: the Day family used them as summer rentals until the 1933 fires burned them.

The loss of the settlement’s buildings did not erase everything associated with it. Michael’s account distinguishes the end of the cabins and the family’s residence from the survival of Sara’s music. The songs persisted after the performers had left and the cabins had burned, making music the most durable trace of the community in the story. The settlement’s history consequently holds two kinds of disappearance together: a brief community whose reasons for leaving remain undocumented, and a cultural presence that survives in song, local memory, and the uneasy atmosphere of the meadow.