Jo's investigation files

Jo's investigation files are a hidden archive of calendars, research notes, photographs, and newspaper clippings through which Jo Noonan's unfinished inquiry exposes what official local histories omit. Discovered inside a small tin box concealed in a plastic owl at Sara Laughs, the files connect her seemingly scattered research to the murder of Sara Tidwell and her son, the harassment of their community, and a longer history of racial exclusion and collective silence.

Research and Origins

Jo's inquiry began as research for an article about the township around the Noonans' summerhouse. Frank Arlen recalled that she initially treated it as a lark, reading books but relying especially on conversations with local people; she listened to accounts of the old days and encouraged people to look for letters and diaries. He believed she stumbled upon the central secret while pursuing that research, rather than setting out to uncover it.

A surviving appointment-calendar entry helped Michael Noonan trace one strand of her movements. It recorded a meeting of Soup Kitchens of Maine in Freeport at 11 a.m. on November 16, 1993. Jo had served on the organization’s board from 1992 until her death. The appointment did not explain why she later traveled the roughly seventy miles to the TR to collect two plastic owls, but it placed an otherwise mysterious errand beside her documented public commitments and left the question of her purpose unresolved.

The Concealed Archive

The archive came to light during the storm at Sara Laughs. Michael found a tin box hidden inside a plastic owl, beneath its base, and recognized it as Jo's “JO'S NOTIONS” box. Inside were folded papers, two wirebound stenographer's books, and a photographic negative. The negative showed Jo on the swimming float in a gray two-piece bathing suit; its presence among the research materials made the box both an investigative cache and an intimate remnant of her life.

Michael understood that Jo had brought the materials to Sara Laughs in July 1994 to gather and hide them. She had removed the owls from the deck, concealed the box in one, wrapped the objects in plastic, and taken them to the hiding place. Frank had heard the deck door bang during that visit. Michael could not know all her reasons or state of mind, but concluded that she had expected him eventually to find the archive. Her actions preserved the work while keeping it out of immediate view.

Evidence Against the Official History

The loose papers included photocopied articles from the Castle Rock Call and its predecessor, the Weekly News, with dates marked in Jo's handwriting. The oldest clipping, from 1865, concerned Jared Devore, then thirty-two. Reading it helped Michael make sense of an apparent mismatch between generations: by the time Sara and the Red-Tops settled at what became Tidwell's Meadow, Jared would have been in his late sixties. The clippings thus linked the local family's past to the community in which Sara's group later lived.

The press accounts of Sara and the Red-Tops preserved a record, but not a neutral one. They described the Black performers through racist caricature and condescension even while presenting the coverage as favorable reviews. The archive makes the gap visible between apparent welcome and the language that framed the group for white readers. Michael found no account in the clippings of why the Red-Tops left, a silence that limits what the newspaper record can establish even as its biases remain revealing.

Jo's notes supplied information absent from published town histories. According to what Michael later told Frank, they documented that by the time of the Castle County Fair the Red-Tops' lakeside community had begun to break apart. Jo had recorded Royce Merrill's account of harassment beginning around Labor Day; it intensified, but Son Tidwell stayed because he wanted to learn what had happened to Sara and her son. The notes also preserved the account of a wooded clearing, about a mile east of Tidwell's Meadow, where a large birch cross stood. After local churches shut their doors to the Black community, it became a place for their services; Reg Tidwell Jr. went there to pray or sit quietly. Someone familiar with his routine concealed a leghold trap on the path he used.

What the Files Reveal and Leave Open

The newspaper file also carried a July 19, 1933, report about the wildfires at Halo Bay. It described Fred Dean fighting fires with two hundred other men when the wind changed and sent the danger toward the north end of the lake. His wife Hilda and their three-year-old twins, William and Carla, were among the families at Halo Bay. The article reported that residents panicked as the fire approached and that vehicles clogged the single road out; a broken-down car or truck then blocked the escape route for those behind it. The clipping gives the files a broader reach than Jo's inquiry into Sara alone, preserving another episode of local catastrophe and the conditions that shaped it.

The archive's force lies in its combination of sources and in their unevenness. Calendars establish dates and movements; clippings preserve public reporting, including its racist language and conspicuous omissions; Jo's notes retain testimony and details missing from official histories; the photograph confirms the personal life carried into the investigation. None of these materials answers every question. Read together, however, they show how Jo assembled a counter-record of the TR and how the past could survive in private documents after public accounts had obscured it.