HISTORY CENTER ACQUIRES RARE FORT WAYNE POLICE DEPT. BADGES
James Stahl, who helped finance the acquisitions, retired from the Fort Wayne Police Department as a Captain in 1980 after twenty years on the force. He has been collecting Fort Wayne and Allen County police paraphernalia since 1974. “I would like to thank Matt Morgan, of the Indianapolis Metro Police Department, who located one of the badges at an antique auction and contacted the History Center to see if they would be interested in it,” said Stahl. “I would also like to thank retired police officer Don Stedge, representing the FOP; Friends of the Fort Wayne-Allen County Police Museum; Chief Rusty York; and many others.”
“These badges could be considered the ‘Holy Grail’ of Fort Wayne law enforcement history, since they are extremely rare,” said Todd Maxwell Pelfrey, History Center executive director. “Whereas police badges today might number into the thousands for a single department, it speaks to the unimaginably small size of the police department that these two early badges are numbered #14 and #19, issued at a time when there were no more than a few dozen officers on the force,” said Pelfrey. “These touchstones to our past are from a time when Fort Wayne was chronically racked with illegal activities to the extent that Chicago Tribune declared Fort Wayne the ‘most lawless city in Indiana’.”
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