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📚 The Derry Historical Society

A Comprehensive Local History — Compiled and edited by Michael Hanlon, Head Librarian and Society Curator

Archives maintained by Bob Polhurst (Curator Emeritus, Head of History Dept., Derry High School 1948–1981) and Michael Hanlon (Librarian & Archivist).

Welcome, friends and researchers. The Derry Historical Society was founded in 1954 to preserve and share the rich history of our community. Our archives, housed in the basement of the Derry Public Library, contain over 15,000 documents, photographs, and artifacts dating back to the town's founding. Researchers are welcome by appointment; please call ahead.

The history of Derry is older than its incorporation papers suggest, and stranger than its booster pamphlets admit. What follows is an honest attempt to record what is known, what is contested, and what remains stubbornly unexplained. Whether by coincidence or ka — as the old Micmac word for fate would have it — the history of Derry follows patterns that are difficult to dismiss as chance.

“A town is not a place. A town is a memory. And some memories do not wish to be remembered.”
— from the foreword to Derry: An Unauthorized History (M. Hanlon, draft, 1994)

Researcher's note: portions of this history have been compiled from primary documents held in the Society's restricted archives. Where official records have been lost, destroyed, or expunged, I have indicated so plainly.

Derry was first settled around 1740 by French and English trappers and loggers working the confluence of the Penobscot River and the Kenduskeag Stream. The town was formally incorporated in 1837. It was, in those early decades, an unremarkable inland logging settlement — with one striking exception.

The earliest recorded anomaly occurred in the winter of 1740-1741, when the entire original settlement of approximately 340 people vanished. When traders arrived in the spring, they found the settlement abandoned: meals were left half-eaten on tables, fires had long gone cold, and livestock wandered untended through the yards. No bodies were ever recovered. No remains have ever been identified. No explanation has ever been offered.

“We found the doors stood open, the bread upon the boards. The horses had eaten through their tethers and gone wild. There was no blood. There were no signs of struggle. It was as though the people had simply walked away in their nightshirts.”
— Trader's journal, attributed to William Hatch, spring 1741. Original held at the Maine State Archives, Augusta.

The Penobscot and Micmac peoples, whose ancestral territory included this region, are recorded in oral histories as having avoided the Kenduskeag confluence. Their name for the place translates, depending on the speaker, as “the spirit that devours” or “the mouth beneath the water.” The land was avoided long before any European set foot upon it.

A second settlement was established in 1745. It survived. Derry, by any honest reckoning, is built upon the empty houses of the first.

The latter half of the nineteenth century saw Derry's transformation from a lumber outpost into a modest industrial center. The Kitchener Ironworks, established in 1856 by the Kitchener family of Boston, soon became the town's largest employer, drawing workers from across northern Maine and the Maritime provinces.

Prosperity was real, but so was the cost. Mortality among ironworkers in the period 1860-1890 exceeded national industrial averages by a factor of four. The company physician, Dr. Albert Hodgson, recorded in his ledger that he could not always determine cause of death from the condition of the remains.

The Easter Sunday Tragedy, 1906

On Easter Sunday, April 15, 1906, the Kitchener Ironworks hosted its annual community Easter egg hunt on the company grounds. Several hundred families attended. At approximately 1:45 PM, the central boiler in the rolling mill detonated. The explosion leveled most of the foundry complex and shattered windows for a mile in every direction.

One hundred and eight people died, including eighty-eight children who had gathered near the foundry door because, witnesses said, “a man inside was calling them to come closer.”

The cause was officially recorded as an accidental boiler explosion. The Ironworks' own engineer, Mr. Cyrus Bayton, had inspected and certified those boilers safe three days prior. Mr. Bayton declined to comment for the official inquiry and was found drowned in the Kenduskeag ten weeks later. Coroner's report: undetermined.

Several surviving witnesses, in statements later removed from the official record, described seeing the boiler-room door open from the inside moments before the blast. One witness, Mrs. Ada Brewer, who lost two children that day, stated for the inquest:

“Something let those doors open. Something wanted those children closer. I saw it. I saw the door swing open by itself. I will not say what I saw inside.”
— Mrs. Ada Brewer, sworn statement, May 3, 1906.

The Kitchener family closed the foundry within the year and relocated to Massachusetts. The ruins remain on the property, behind a chain-link fence, to this day.

On October 31, 1929, seven members of the Al Bradley Gang — a notorious Midwestern bank-robbing outfit then on the run from federal agents — entered Derry intending to rob the Derry Merchant's Bank on Canal Street. What followed defies rational explanation.

Within minutes of the gang's arrival, over fifty armed citizens converged on the scene from every direction. They had not been summoned. No alarm had been raised. They simply came. They opened fire simultaneously, as if on a signal no investigator has since been able to identify. All seven gang members were killed. Four bystanders were also killed in the crossfire.

Witnesses described the citizens' behavior as “coordinated,” “trance-like,” and “calm in a way that was not human.” Several of the shooters later reported having no memory of the event. One, Mr. Patrick Lassiter, attested under oath that he had been at his kitchen table eating breakfast and then, suddenly, he was on Canal Street holding a smoking rifle. No charges were ever filed.

The massacre took place in and around the Silver Dollar Bar, also on Canal Street. The bar reopened the following week but never recovered its trade. It has been closed permanently since 1956.

“It was as though the town itself rose up.”
— Editorial, The Derry News, November 2, 1929.

The Black Spot was a nightclub located on the outskirts of Derry, popular with Black soldiers stationed at the nearby Army Air Corps base. It was, for a brief period, one of the only integrated establishments in central Maine.

On the night of November 12, 1930, the Black Spot burned to the ground. Ninety-three people died in the fire. The official cause was listed as electrical fault. The investigation lasted six days.

Survivors — including Sgt. William Hanlon, this curator's grandfather — reported that the fire began simultaneously in multiple locations along the perimeter of the building, and that the exit doors had been blocked from the outside. Sgt. Hanlon's testimony, which was not included in any official document, described seeing a figure standing in the fire: a tall man in an old-fashioned formal suit, who appeared unburned, and who was laughing.

No state investigation was conducted. No charges were ever filed. The ruins were bulldozed within a week of the fire. The land sits empty.

My grandfather wrote down what he saw that night in a private notebook. I read it for the first time in 1958, when I was eleven years old. I remember being angry that no one had been held to account. I am still angry. — M.H.

Between October 1957 and August 1958, approximately forty children and twenty-seven adults were reported missing or found dead in Derry. This figure represents the highest per-capita rate of violent death in any American city during peacetime in the twentieth century.

The disappearances shared common features: victims were typically children, often last seen near storm drains, culverts, or the banks of the Kenduskeag. When remains were recovered — in a minority of cases — they showed evidence of extreme violence. The Bangor Daily News refused, by editorial policy, to publish photographs of the bodies.

A group of seven local children were reportedly involved in events that summer. Police records from the period are incomplete and, in several places, contradictory. The names of these children are known to this curator and will not be published here without their consent.

The Great Flood of 1958

In August 1958, the Kenduskeag overflowed its banks in a manner unprecedented in recorded local history. The flood destroyed much of the Canal District's underground infrastructure — including the older brick tunnels predating the town's modern sewer system. Coincidentally or otherwise, the wave of disappearances ceased with the floodwaters.

A memorial plaque was later placed at the base of the Derry Standpipe, dedicated to the victims. It reads, simply:

For the children. We will not forget.

Researcher's note: a second memorial plaque was added to the Standpipe site in 1986, dedicated to the victims of the 1984-1985 violence. The bronze was donated anonymously. I have my suspicion as to the donor. — M.H.

For twenty-six years, between 1958 and 1984, Derry was — by its own statistics — an unremarkable Maine town. Then, in the summer of 1984, history repeated itself with devastating precision.

The first reported victim of the new cycle was Cheryl Lamonica, age nine, whose body was recovered from the Kenduskeag in the summer of 1984. By the end of 1985, at least fourteen children had vanished. The pattern of disappearances was, in detail and in geography, indistinguishable from 1957-58.

This curator first noted the twenty-seven-year interval between the cycles — 1957 to 1984 — and shared the relevant research with local authorities, with the state historical commission, and with three state police investigators. The responses were uniformly dismissive. The research was lost in the mail on two occasions and was characterized, on a third occasion, as “unhelpful speculation.”

A second flood event occurred in August 1985, again concentrated in the Canal District underground. Again, the disappearances ceased.

It is now 1994. By the calendar, we should have another seventeen years before the projected next cycle of 2011. However, the pattern appears to have broken. Children are disappearing again. Seven this year. This curator does not know what this acceleration means. It terrifies him.

If I am wrong about the math, I am wrong. If I am right, then it has woken early, and the old promises must now be kept. I have made my telephone calls. — M.H., October 1994.

The Kenduskeag Stream ("eel-river" in Penobscot) winds through the heart of Derry, joining the Penobscot at the southern edge of town. Along its eastern bank lies The Barrens, a roughly twenty-acre tract of undeveloped low-lying scrub, marsh, and pine.

Despite numerous development proposals over one hundred and fifty years, The Barrens has never been built upon. Proposals have failed due to “geological instability,” “zoning disputes,” or “permit complications.” The real reason, in this curator's opinion, is that no one can bear to remain there long. Surveyors report disorientation. Engineers report equipment failures. Workmen report dreams.

The underground tunnel system beneath Derry, originally constructed for flood control and sanitary drainage, is among the largest such systems in New England for a city of comparable population. Several segments are documented in DPW maintenance records. The remainder is not. Many of the older brick tunnels predate the town's founding in 1740. Their builders are unknown.

The Derry Standpipe. A 1,750,000-gallon municipal water tower, constructed 1899-1903 on the high ground north of town. The tower is presently closed to the public. Three drownings have been reported inside the structure since its construction. The cause remains undetermined in each instance, given that the affected parties were not known to swim and were not present near the top of the tower at any prior time.

The Paul Bunyan Statue. A twenty-foot fiberglass and steel statue, erected in 1958 in Canal Street Park to commemorate the town's logging heritage. The statue has been reported “moving” by intoxicated individuals on at least twelve separate occasions since its installation. Reports are routinely dismissed.

The Kissing Bridge. A covered timber bridge in Bassey Park, restored 1973. Generations of Derry High students have carved their initials into its beams. Recent inspection revealed the carving “PENNYWISE LIVES” in fresh wood, dated 1994. The author is unknown.

The Canal District & Flood Control System. Established 1881. Brick-lined and largely undocumented below the second sub-basement level.

Freese's Department Store. Built 1898. Still in operation downtown. Notable for an unusually deep basement.

The Derry Town House. A residential hotel on Up-Mile Hill, built 1907. Most of the older guest registers were lost in a 1958 basement flood.

29 Neibolt Street. A condemned wood-frame residence on the south side of town, vacant since approximately 1958. Despite seventeen formal demolition orders issued by the Derry Buildings Department between 1962 and 1994, the structure stands. Trespassers are reported regularly. DPD officers who have entered the property describe the interior, when they will speak of it at all, as “wrong” — a description they decline to elaborate.

The following table presents major events of violence or disappearance in Derry's recorded history. The intervals are presented without commentary. The reader may draw such conclusions as they wish.

For research inquiries, please contact Michael Hanlon at the Derry Public Library, library.html, or directly by phone at (207) 555-0130. Archives are open by appointment only, Tuesday through Thursday, 10AM-4PM. Serious researchers are welcome. Casual inquirers are also welcome, but the more sensitive collections require institutional affiliation.

Mr. Hanlon's unpublished manuscript, Derry: An Unauthorized History, covers patterns of violence dating from the town's earliest settlement to the present day. The manuscript has not been endorsed by the Derry Town Council, which has formally requested that the manuscript not be circulated until “such time as the historical record can be properly verified.” That time, it seems, will not come.

Email: history@derry.me.us  •  Phone: (207) 555-0130  •  Address: Derry Public Library, 145 Kansas St., Derry, ME 04401

If you have read this far — thank you. There is more in the archives. Ask for me by name. — Michael Hanlon, October 14, 1994.