Autumn 1993–Spring 1994

Autumn 1993–Spring 1994 marks Jo Noonan’s investigation into the history of the township around Sara Laughs, a project that exposes the gap between its genial local stories and the violence those stories leave out. By talking to residents, collecting old papers, and recording oral accounts, she assembled a counter-history of Sara and the Red-Tops that would later help Michael Noonan understand what had happened at the lake.

The investigation begins

Jo’s research began as work for an article, though its precise scope was not clear even to those who knew about it. Frank Arlen recalled that she had initially treated it as a lark, playing detective and intending, perhaps, to surprise Michael with what she found. She read books, but relied especially on conversation: she listened to residents’ stories of the old days and coaxed them into looking for letters and diaries. Frank thought she was exceptionally good at this work.

The inquiry extended beyond the township itself. Bill Dean said that, from fall 1993 through winter and spring 1994, Jo went around town and as far as Motton and Harlow with a notebook and a small tape recorder. He remembered warning her that the TR had its sore toes and corns, and asking her not to tread on them. Jo said she understood, but continued asking questions. Bill later described her visits as listening to old people’s stories, while Michael recognized that Bill was lying about the extent of what he knew. The lie was clumsy, but its existence made Jo’s investigation feel less like harmless curiosity and more like something the community still had reason to conceal.

Records, photographs, and local memory

Jo’s project drew on a mixture of oral history and documentary material. In 1998, Michael obtained faxed photocopies of her appointment calendars, which showed that she had kept a record of her contacts. Her wider research also included photographs and press clippings, and she had spoken with local people who could point her toward old letters and diaries. The surviving materials reveal a method built from fragments rather than a single authoritative account.

One book she consulted was Edward Osteen’s privately published Dark Score Days, issued in 1965 or 1966 after commercial and regional publishers declined it. A local resident dismissed Osteen’s writing and photography but conceded that he told useful stories about the region, including the fires of the 1930s. The book contained an old photograph of Sara and the Red-Tops, which Osteen believed had been taken at the Fryeburg Fair in 1900. That image offered a trace of the group, but not an explanation of why they later left.

Jo’s clippings supplied a sharper contrast between public remembrance and suppressed history. The material about Sara and the Red-Tops included newspaper reviews that described the Black performers through racist language and condescending stereotypes. Michael recognized these as reviews, even when they were favorable by the standards of their time. The clippings did not explain the circumstances of the group’s departure; Jo’s notes and the testimony she gathered from residents filled some of that silence.

What the inquiry uncovered

According to Jo’s notes, the Red-Tops’ community near the lake had begun to break apart by the time the group played the Castle County Fair. Active harassment started by Labor Day, and grew uglier and more frightening day by day. Royce Merrill told Jo that Son Tidwell refused to leave until he learned what had happened to his sister and nephew; the family remained in the meadow even after others had gone elsewhere in search of safety.

Jo’s investigation also uncovered the local context of that pressure. Black residents had been shut out of local churches and held services in a clearing in the woods, where a large birch cross stood. Son’s son, called Junior in the account Michael later heard, often went there to pray or sit quietly. Residents knew his routine. Someone concealed a leghold trap on the narrow woodland path he used, covering it with leaves and needles. The trap turns the history from a record of generalized hostility into a specific act made possible by surveillance of a child’s ordinary movements.

The materials also complicated the town’s accepted account of its own past. Among Jo’s papers, Michael later found a clipping from 1865 about Jared Devore, then thirty-two, returning home. He connected that record to the period when Sara and the Red-Tops settled on what became Tidwell’s Meadow: Jared would then have been in his late sixties, a former Civil War soldier and an older man whom younger men might have regarded as a model. The connection suggested how the history of the Red-Tops could reach back through generations, even when the public record did not make that continuity explicit.

Concealment and significance

The town’s histories contained no mention of the harassment described in Jo’s notes. The contrast is not simply between accurate and inaccurate documents: the newspapers preserve racist descriptions of the performers while omitting the circumstances that drove their community apart. Oral accounts, private papers, and Jo’s own collected records therefore become essential to recovering events that official local memory has excluded.

Jo did not tell Michael what she was finding. Frank believed the secrecy began as a plan to surprise him, and that Jo herself may have stumbled upon the deeper story while pursuing ordinary research. Her investigation thus acquired stakes beyond the article that first prompted it. By gathering evidence and hiding it, she left Michael a route into a history that the town had neither recorded openly nor willingly discussed. The period’s importance lies in that double movement: Jo listened closely enough to recover what residents knew, while the community’s silence made the recovery necessary.