The time of the fires

The time of the fires refers to the 1930s fires in the TR, a period whose public memory is fragmentary and whose human cost emerges through oral testimony and Jo’s hidden research. The fires were not only a natural disaster: the account of Carla Dean’s death, alongside the suppressed history of Sara and the Red-Tops, reveals a community shaped by racial exclusion and a code of silence about its own past.

The Fires and Carla Dean

The fires are recalled as occurring in the 1930s. In one account, Bill Dean’s twin sister, Carla, died during the fires sixty-five years before the conversation in which the story is disclosed. The woman sharing this information does not know precisely how Carla died; Bill never talks about it. The uncertainty is part of the period’s surviving record: a death is known, but the circumstances remain sealed within family and local silence.

Carla’s death is linked to the fires Bill said had been set by Ki’s grandfather as his going-away present to the TR. The report does not establish the full circumstances of the blaze or Carla’s death, but it preserves the accusation and its association with the community’s past. Even the informant fears that speaking about it could cost her the ability to make another bed in the TR, and suspects Bill may already know she has spoken.

A Disaster in the Local Record

The fires also appear in accounts of the township’s history. A local resident recalls the twister of the eighteen-eighties and the fires in the nineteen-thirties among the area’s memorable stories. Edward Osteen’s privately published book, Dark Score Days, gives space to such local material, though it was not taken up by commercial or regional publishers and sold only a small number of copies locally. The fires therefore survive partly through informal histories rather than through a widely circulated public account.

Jo’s research gives the fires a more specific documentary trace. Among the papers preserved in her concealed archive, a newspaper clipping from the Castle Rock Call, dated July 19, 1933, bears the headline “VETERAN GUIDE, CARETAKER, CANNOT SAVE DAUGHTER.” It reports that Fred Dean was fighting wildfires in the eastern part of the TR with two hundred other men when the wind changed, threatening the lake’s north end, which had been considered safe. At the time, local people maintained fishing and hunting camps there, and the community included a general store and a settlement called Halo Bay. Fred’s wife, Hilda, and their three-year-old twins, William and Carla, were at Halo Bay while he was away fighting the fire. The clipping anchors Carla’s death in a particular day’s reporting, even as other testimony leaves the manner of her death uncertain.

The Hidden History Around the Fires

Jo’s investigation began as research for an article about the township. She read books but relied especially on talking with residents, listening to stories of earlier days, and coaxing people to look for old letters and diaries. At first, her secrecy may have been intended to preserve a surprise for her husband; what she uncovered, Frank believes, was something she stumbled upon while pursuing the research.

Her archive makes the difference between public history and private memory visible. The old newspaper clippings about Sara and the Red-Tops describe them in racist, patronizing terms, presenting them as local entertainment while reducing them to racial caricatures. Yet the clippings do not explain the circumstances of the group’s departure. Jo’s notes preserve what the town histories omit: by the time the Red-Tops played the Castle County Fair, their lakeside community had begun to break apart, and active harassment had started by Labor Day, according to Royce Merrill’s account. Son Tidwell stayed with his blood family in the meadow even after others had left for safer places, unwilling to go before learning what had happened to his sister and nephew.

Memory, Silence, and Consequence

The recovered accounts connect the fires to a wider pattern of exclusion without making every historical gap disappear. The 1933 clipping describes a sudden change in the wind and the danger to Halo Bay; the later account of Carla’s death preserves a family’s silence and an accusation about how the fires began. Jo’s papers, residents’ recollections, and the old newspaper record do not fully agree in scope or purpose, but together they recover details that official town histories leave out.

The period consequently stands for more than a span of years or a sequence of fires. Its stories show how a disaster can be recorded in headlines while the social conditions surrounding it remain unspoken. The history of Carla Dean and the persecution of Sara and the Red-Tops are carried forward unevenly—in a clipping, a private archive, a resident’s guarded disclosure, and the silences that accompany them. The time of the fires is thus both a local catastrophe and a test of who gets remembered, whose account is trusted, and what the community chooses to bury.