Company E

Company E was a segregated unit of African American soldiers stationed at the Derry Army Air Corps Base in 1929 and 1930. The twenty-seven men of Company E were housed in a substandard barracks far from the main base, heated by a balky wood furnace and lacking storm windows. They were barred from the white NCO Club and from most of Derry's bars, which were off-limits by order of Major Fuller after complaints from the Town Council. The men responded by converting an old requisition shed into their own social club, which they called the Black Spot.

Origins and the Black Spot

The Black Spot began as a dark, smelly shed full of old tools and moldy papers, with a dirt floor and only two small windows. Under the leadership of Pfc. Dick Hallorann and with labor from the entire unit, the men transformed it into a functioning club. They cut additional windows, installed electricity through "midnight requisitions," built a kitchen with a grill and deep-fryers, and put up a sign reading "THE BLACK SPOT — COMPANY E AND GUESTS." By the summer of 1930, the club was open on Friday and Saturday nights, serving sodas and hamburgers. A Dixieland combo formed from within the unit—Martin Devereaux on drums, Ace Stevenson on cornet, Pop Snopes on piano, and others on clarinet and saxophone—drew crowds from Derry and surrounding towns. White civilians, including fraternity boys from the University of Maine and their sorority girlfriends, began to attend, bringing their own liquor. The club became so popular that by October it was packed every weekend.

The Fire

The success of the Black Spot provoked the Derry branch of the Maine Legion of White Decency, a Northern version of the Ku Klux Klan. On a Saturday night in early November 1930, while the club was crowded with perhaps two or three hundred people, members of the Legion approached from two directions: some came through the greenbelt between the base and West Broadway, carrying torches and gasoline, while others drove onto the base in a new Packard automobile. They doused their torches with gasoline and threw them through the back windows into the kitchen. The fire spread rapidly. The single door became jammed as panicked patrons pushed against it from inside, trapping many. Will Hanlon survived by escaping through a window with the help of Trevor Dawson and Dick Hallorann. Dawson commandeered a cargo truck and drove it into the side of the burning building, creating a second exit. Despite these efforts, over sixty people died, including eighteen from Company E, fourteen or fifteen Black civilians from town, four members of the jazz band, and a number of white patrons. The fire was never officially solved, and the Legion of White Decency disbanded in Derry shortly afterward.

Aftermath and Legacy

The fire ended the cycle of murder and disappearance that had occurred in Derry in 1929-30, functioning as a monstrous sacrifice that quieted the town's underlying evil for another quarter-century. The army dispersed the survivors of Company E to other posts. Will Hanlon, who had lost most of his left foot in a training accident before the fire, was discharged with a disability pension in 1937. He later returned to Derry with his wife, Jessica, and bought a farm on Witcham Road, where he raised his son, Mike. The fire remained a defining memory for Will, who told his son that it "made me a man" and that the soil of Derry seemed to nourish bad things. The Black Spot's destruction became a suppressed chapter in Derry's history, one that Mike Hanlon would uncover decades later in his research for an unauthorized town history.