Other Marklanders did not think this was fair. On the next Sunday afternoon, some of them held a meeting in the yard of one of the sawmills. They appointed a committee of seven men to deal with this problem. One of the men was W. J. Frampton, who became their leader. They also asked Clara Cochius, the teacher, why the Butt family had been dismissed. She said Mr. Emerson had acted on her advice.

The committee met again and decided to have a meeting for all Marklanders on Tuesday, April 28. They were given permission to hold this meeting, but were told not to have it during work time. At the Tuesday meeting, the Marklanders drew up a petition to protest the dismissal of the Butt family. One of the managers went to the meeting. When he asked why they were holding the meeting, the men said it was for "the purpose of protecting their families from dismissal from Markland for matters pertaining to the school."⁸ The petition was signed by 88 members of the settlement. It was sent to a manager to be forwarded to the Trustees of Markiand and the Commission of Government.

Early the next morning, the seven men on the committee that organized the meeting were told that they were also dismissed from the settlement, as of May 7, 1936. It must have been a shock for these men to find that this could happen just because they held a public meeting and made a petition. They were going to lose the houses they lived in, their jobs and their futures as farmers in Markland. In the week of May 7, five of the men on the committee came to St. John's to see the governor, Humphrey Walwyn. They asked for an investigation into the way Markland was being run. They also asked not to be dismissed from Markland until after the investigation was over. In their petition to the governor, these men said that Markland was being run in a way that "offend[ed], in every way, the principles of liberty, justice and fair dealing."⁹

The trustees of Markland said that the Butt family had been expelled for keeping their children out of school. In a letter to Governor Walwyn, Frederick Emerson said, "there has always been...at Markland, people who have always given a certain amount of trouble since they first arrived." The trustees said that the seven members of the committee had been told not to hold their meeting in regular working hours, but they did and that was why they were dismissed. Governor Humphrey Walwyn had just arrived in Newfoundland. Maybe he did not think he knew enough about the situation to make his own decision. He told the men he had been advised that their dismissal "was justifiable."