the disappearance of the original settlers (1741)

The disappearance of the original settlers of Derry in 1741 is the town's foundational mystery, a mass vanishing that sets the pattern for all the cyclical horrors to come. In June of that year, a community of approximately three hundred and forty souls was present; by October, the entire village stood utterly deserted, with a single wooden home burned to the ground. No bodies, no bones, and no evidence of an Indian massacre, flood, or disease were ever found. The only remotely comparable event in American history is the disappearance of the Roanoke Island colonists, yet the Derry disappearance remains virtually unknown, even to the town's own residents. Mike Hanlon, researching the town's history, discovers that the standard Maine history textbook used in local junior high schools contains no mention of the event, despite having over forty index entries for Derry. This erasure is itself part of the pattern: a curtain of quiet that cloaks much of what has happened in Derry.

The Event and Its Obscurity

The original party of white settlers, numbering about three hundred, were English members of the Derrie Company, granted a charter for land covering what is today Derry, most of Newport, and surrounding areas. They were present in June of 1741, but by October they had all vanished. The Michaud history firmly states that all villagers were slaughtered by Indians, but there is no basis for this claim save the one burned house. More likely, a stove simply got too hot. The disappearance is a quiet fit to the pattern of Derry's history: a kind of curtain of quiet that cloaks much of what has happened. Mike Hanlon, in his research, quizzes several junior-high students taking the required Maine-history course, and none of them know a thing about it. He then checks the text, Maine Then and Now, which has better than forty index entries for Derry, mostly concerning the boom years of the lumber industry, but nothing about the disappearance of the original colonists.

The Pattern of Cyclical Violence

The 1741 disappearance is the earliest recorded instance of a cycle of catastrophic violence that recurs in Derry every twenty-seven years or so. This pattern, which Mike Hanlon comes to understand through his research, includes the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks in 1906, the fire at the Black Spot in 1930, and the murders committed by It in 1957-58 and 1984-85. The disappearance itself is a kind of monstrous sacrifice, a quiet fit to the pattern that sets the stage for all that follows. The town's history is like a rambling old mansion filled with rooms and cubbyholes, and the disappearance is one of its most secret chambers. As Albert Carson tells Mike, "Some of the rooms are locked, but there are keys... there are keys." The disappearance is a key that unlocks an understanding of Derry's true nature.

The Town's Capacity for Forgetting

The obscurity of the 1741 disappearance is a central feature of Derry's character. The town has a peculiar ability to forget its own darkest moments, a phenomenon that Bill Denbrough will later come to discover. This forgetting is almost an art in Derry, a way of coping with the recurring horror. The disappearance is not just a historical event; it is a template for the town's relationship with its own past. The fact that it is unknown even to local schoolchildren, despite being a case unique in American history, demonstrates the power of this collective amnesia. Mike Hanlon's research is an attempt to pierce this veil, to remember what the town has chosen to forget, and to understand the cycle of violence that has shaped Derry for centuries.