Thomaston State Prison

Thomaston State Prison is a Maine correctional facility that appears in the novel as the destination for one of the three young men convicted in the murder of Adrian Mellon. John Webber Garton, who led the attack on Mellon on the Main Street Bridge during the final night of Derry's Canal Days Festival in July 1984, was sentenced to ten to twenty years at Thomaston for first-degree manslaughter. The prison stands as the legal endpoint for the violence that erupted when Garton, Steven Dubay, and Christopher Unwin confronted Mellon and his boyfriend Don Hagarty after the fair, a confrontation that ended with Mellon thrown into the Canal and then killed by the entity under the bridge. While Dubay was sent to Shawshank State Prison and Unwin received a suspended juvenile sentence, Garton's incarceration at Thomaston represents the most severe punishment meted out by the Derry District Court. The novel notes that at the time of writing, all three sentences were under appeal, and Garton could be seen on any given day girl-watching or playing Penny Pitch in Bassey Park, not far from where Mellon's torn body was found floating against one of the pilings of the Main Street Bridge. Thomaston State Prison thus functions as a symbol of the incomplete justice of Derry's legal system, where the human perpetrators are nominally punished while the true killer—the entity that had been feeding on Derry's children for centuries—remains unacknowledged by the courts.