Derry Ladies' Society

The Derry Ladies' Society is a local civic organization in Derry, Maine, that functions as a gatekeeper of public memory and community standards. During the 1984 Canal Days Festival, the Society sponsored the Canal Days Museum, which was installed in three empty storefronts downtown and curated by Michael Hanlon, a local librarian and amateur historian. The museum featured exhibits loaned by the town's oldest families, including eating-house menus from the 1890s, loggers' tools from the 1880s, children's toys from the 1920s, and over two thousand photographs and nine reels of movie film documenting life in Derry over the previous century. Nearly forty thousand visitors paid a quarter each to view the collection.

Censorship and the Shaping of Public Memory

The Derry Ladies' Society exercised veto power over Hanlon's proposed exhibits. They rejected the notorious tramp-chair from the 1930s, a cast-iron device with manacles built into the arms and legs and rounded knobs protruding from the back and seat, which had been used to punish vagrants who drifted into town. The Society also vetoed photographs of the Bradley Gang after their notorious shootout on Canal Street in 1929, in which local citizens—including the publisher of the Derry News—participated in gunning down the gang members. The Society's preference was to "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative," as the old song said, reflecting a deliberate policy of suppressing uncomfortable historical truths.

Role in the Canal Days Festival

The Canal Days Festival ran from July 15th to July 21st, 1984, marking the centenary of the Canal's opening, which had fully opened Derry to the lumber trade from 1884 to 1910. The town was spruced up from east to west and north to south, with potholes filled, town buildings refurbished and repainted, and graffiti in Bassey Park—including anti-gay statements such as "KILL ALL QUEERS" and "AIDS FROM GOD YOU HELL-BOUND HOMOS!!"—sanded off benches and the wooden walls of the Kissing Bridge. The Society's sponsorship of the museum was part of this broader effort to present a sanitized image of Derry.

Narrative Significance

The Derry Ladies' Society embodies the town's institutionalized mechanism of forgetting. Their censorship of the tramp-chair and the Bradley Gang photographs aligns with the pattern Mike Hanlon documents in his unpublished history: that Derry's residents have a way of looking the other way, of papering over atrocities, and of refusing to acknowledge the cycles of violence that recur every twenty-seven years. The Society's insistence on a positive, selective narrative mirrors the larger forces that allow the entity known as It to operate within Derry, as the town's collective amnesia protects the monster from scrutiny. The Society's decisions, while ostensibly about taste and propriety, serve the deeper function of maintaining the conditions under which horror can flourish unnoticed.