Jo investigates the history of Sara and Red-Tops

Jo’s investigation into Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops begins as research for a possible local-history article and becomes a private effort to assemble a record that the community’s published histories have left out. By talking with residents, pursuing old documents, and preserving evidence, she uncovers the history of Sara and her son, the treatment of the Red-Tops, and the silence that followed their murders. The investigation’s importance lies not only in what Jo discovers, but in how she saves it: scattered records hidden away for Mike to find after her death.

An Unannounced Project

Jo did not tell Mike at the time that she was considering writing about the history of the township where their summerhouse stood. Bill Dean later told Mike that Jo had discussed writing something about Sara and the Red-Tops for a local paper, and might also have mentioned Yankee magazine. Bill said he had warned her that her inquiries could upset people in the area. Jo had reportedly answered that she understood, but continued asking questions.

Bill’s recollection placed her investigation in the fall of 1993 and the winter and spring of 1994. He said she traveled around the area, including Motton and Harlow, carrying a notebook and a small tape recorder. He described her as listening to older residents and collecting their stories, although he minimized what she was doing and framed it as a risk to local sensitivities. Mike recognized that Bill was lying about something, making his guarded account evidence in its own right: the project touched a subject that people in the TR preferred not to discuss.

Frank Arlen later offered a fuller account of how Jo worked. The research began as an article, something of a lark for her, and she initially kept it from Mike because she may have wanted it to be a surprise. She read books, but chiefly spoke with people, listened to accounts of the old days, and encouraged them to look for letters and diaries. Frank thought she was particularly good at drawing out these stories. His description recasts her inquiry as patient oral history supported by private documents, rather than mere curiosity about the past.

Tracing Dates and Sources

A small notation on Jo’s appointment calendar gave Mike a specific lead. Ward Hankins found that the second week of November 1993 contained one entry: “S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M.” Mike understood the abbreviation as Soup Kitchens of Maine, where Jo served on the board from 1992 until her death, and Freep as Freeport. The entry indicated a board meeting on Tuesday, November 16. It did not explain everything, but helped Mike place Jo’s charitable work and her later trip to the TR on the same day: after the meeting, she had driven roughly seventy miles to take delivery of two plastic owls.

The appointment calendars reached Mike by fax after he contacted Ward and Jo’s friend Bonnie Amudson. Mike told Bonnie that Jo might have been writing one or more articles about the township and that her questions had apparently angered some local people. Bonnie was surprised. Jo had shown her photographs and herb samples, but not writing; Bonnie recalled Jo saying she had decided to leave writing to Mike. The contrast between that remark and the evidence of Jo’s research leaves her motives partly uncertain. The documents establish that she pursued the project, while the reasons she concealed it remain unresolved.

Jo’s research was also prompted by older published accounts. A local resident pointed Mike toward Dark Score Days, a privately published book by Edward Osteen, who had been a summer resident and later lived in the area full-time. The book included stories about local landmarks, a nineteenth-century tornado, and the fires of the 1930s. Osteen had also included an old photograph of Sara and the Red-Tops, which he thought had been taken at the Fryeburg Fair in 1900. The book supplied a starting point, but its local circulation and its limited treatment of the group could not substitute for the testimony and records Jo sought.

The Hidden Archive

Mike eventually discovered the physical remains of Jo’s inquiry in a small tin box concealed inside a plastic owl. The box, marked JO’S NOTIONS, held folded papers, two wirebound stenography books, and a photographic negative of Jo standing on the swimming float at Sara Laughs. The papers and notebooks had been collected and hidden at the property; the negative connected the archive to Jo herself. Their concealment showed that her work was not simply abandoned: she had taken pains to preserve it, though the evidence does not establish every reason for doing so.

Much of the loose material consisted of photocopied newspaper clippings, dated in Jo’s handwriting and drawn from the Castle Rock Call and its predecessor, the Weekly News. The oldest clipping, from 1865, concerned Jared Devore, then thirty-two. Reading it helped Mike make sense of the generations that appeared not to align. By the time Sara and the Red-Tops settled on the land later known as Tidwell’s Meadow, Jared would have been in his late sixties. Jo’s dated copies made it possible to connect a fragmentary newspaper record to family chronology and to the later history of the group.

The clippings reveal how the newspapers represented Sara and the Red-Tops in their own time. Their descriptions were framed as praise, yet relied on racist stereotypes: the group appeared as “our Southern blackbirds” and “our rhythmic darkies,” while Sara was described through exoticizing language. Mike recognizes these items as reviews, not neutral records of the people they purported to describe. Their genial tone masks the racial hierarchy embedded in the public account; the archive preserves both the fact that the group performed and the degrading terms through which white readers were encouraged to see them.

What the Public Record Leaves Out

The newspaper clippings do not explain the circumstances in which the Red-Tops left the area. Their silence is especially telling because Jo’s notes, as Mike later learns, preserve a much harsher account of the community’s response to Sara’s murder and the death of her child. By September 1901, nearly everyone on the TR knew Sara and her son had been murdered, and many had an idea who was responsible. Reg Tidwell Jr. pressed the county sheriff first to search for them alive, then to find their bodies, and finally to identify their killers. He persisted because he believed they had been murdered.

The notes also record the community’s gradual withdrawal from the Red-Tops. According to Jo’s research, the group’s local community had begun breaking up by the time of the Castle County Fair. Harassment started by Labor Day and grew more frightening, but Son Tidwell refused to leave until he learned what had happened to his sister and nephew. The account contrasts the group’s earlier welcome with the isolation that followed: the Red-Tops had been treated well while circumstances were favorable, but that apparent acceptance did not protect them when the community faced a crisis.

Jo’s materials connect personal testimony to a specific history of exclusion. A wooded clearing about a mile east of Tidwell’s Meadow had a large birch cross and served as a place of worship after local churches closed their doors to the Black community. Reg Tidwell Jr. often went there to pray or sit quietly, and local residents knew his routine. Jo’s notes say that someone placed a concealed leghold trap on the path he used. The detail makes clear that the historical record is not merely incomplete through accident: the research documents a community in which exclusion and violence were followed by silence.

Discovery and Significance

The archive changes the status of Jo’s project from a half-known possibility into a substantial investigation. Mike had heard from Bill that she asked questions, and from Frank that she was gathering stories and looking for letters and diaries. In the box, those methods become material evidence: notebooks, dated press clippings, and a photograph. The records also disclose their limits. Newspaper stories do not account for the Red-Tops’ departure, and the reason Jo hid the archive cannot be known with certainty. Her research offers a counter-record, not a complete resolution of every question.

The investigation’s narrative force comes from the difference between what the town published and what Jo assembled. Local histories contain no account of the later harassment described in her notes, while the newspaper clippings’ praise of the Red-Tops is inseparable from racist caricature. Jo’s archive restores testimony and context that the public record excluded, but also shows how much depends on fragile private sources and people willing to speak. Her work allows Mike to recognize that the apparent gaps in the history were themselves part of the story: the community’s shared silence helped conceal what had happened.