The Silver Dollar

The Silver Dollar, also known as the Sleepy Silver Dollar, was a rough beer-joint located in Derry's Hell's Half-Acre district, a neighborhood of bars and blind pigs that flourished during the town's lumber-boom years. It stood on Exchange Street, near the Canal, in an area where loggers, railroad workers, and prostitutes mingled in establishments that operated with little regard for Prohibition or the law. The bar was a place of sawdust floors, hard drinking, and casual violence, emblematic of Derry's rougher underside.

The Claude Heroux Massacre

The Silver Dollar is most infamous for the mass murder that took place there on September 9, 1905. Claude Heroux, a French-Canadian lumberman who had been driven half-mad by the murder of his friend and lover, union organizer Davey Hartwell, entered the bar carrying a double-bitted woodsman's axe. While the other patrons continued their conversations and drinking, seemingly oblivious, Heroux walked to a back table where five men—William Mueller's enforcers, believed to be among those who had killed Hartwell—were playing poker. He began methodically chopping them to death. He severed Floyd Calderwood's hand, split Tinker McCutcheon's head, disemboweled Eddie King, and pursued Lathrop Rounds (El Katook) across the room, decapitating him. The only survivor, Stugley Grenier, escaped by crawling through the outhouse hole. Heroux was later lynched by a mob from the same bars where he had been drinking.

The Clown's Presence

During the massacre and the subsequent lynching, a figure in clown makeup was seen among the crowd. Egbert Thoroughgood, an eyewitness who was drinking at the bar during the killings, later recalled seeing a "comical sort of fella" doing flips, juggling glasses, and performing tricks in the Bloody Bucket, a bar near the Silver Dollar, on the night of the lynching. Thoroughgood said he saw this figure "a few now'n thens since," suggesting that Pennywise the Dancing Clown was present at this gaudy sacrifice, as he had been at other pivotal moments of violence in Derry's history.

Location and Significance

The Silver Dollar was part of a network of bars in Hell's Half-Acre that included Nan's, the Paradise, Wally's Spa, and the Powderhorn. These establishments served the lumbermen who came to town after long stretches in the woods, and they were the only places where the black soldiers of Company E were allowed to drink, though the Town Council eventually forced them out. The Silver Dollar's destruction—like that of the Black Spot nightclub in 1930 and the Kitchener Ironworks in 1906—marked the violent end of one of Derry's periodic cycles of terror. The bar itself is long gone, but its legacy as a site where the town's darkest impulses erupted into open slaughter remains a key part of Derry's hidden history.