When the Wilmington Memorial Public Safety Building was dedicated in October of 2001, it represented a more than two-hundred-and-fifty-year evolution in the design and concept of the police station.
Upon the incorporation of Wilmington in 1730, the townsfolk appointed Giles Roberts as their first constable. Mr. Roberts lived in a diminutive abode located on present day Boutwell Street. In that year, the gambrel roofed home, in essence became Wilmington’s first police station. Albeit, still merely a residence, it did serve as a place to find the town’s peace keeping constable should the need for his services ever arise. When the house was demolished in 1930 it had probably stood across the parts of four centuries. As constables continued to be elected and serve, their homes remained their de facto offices. However, upon the appointment of the town’s first police officers in the 1870s, their duties and responsibilities began to demand a dedicated physical infrastructure.
In 1884, the Annual Town Meeting appropriated $300.00 for the construction of a jail and its situation at a convenient place. Alternately known as the lockup, the jail and the house of correction this wooden structure was erected on land adjacent to the Congregational Church. The building was approximately 15’ x 20’ and within was a jail cell, a woodstove and space for the Keeper of the Lockup, an appointed town official tasked with overseeing the jail. Toilet facilities consisted of a chamber pot. The building stood at its original location until 1900 when it was moved across the street to the Town Hall lot. It was then attached as an addition to the Town Hall where it continued to serve as the town’s jail. However, by 1920, the Police Chief and Keeper of the Lockup (positions often held by the same person) had found different accommodations. By that time, Chief of Police Walter Hill maintained a small office and telephone at his home on Middlesex Avenue near Main Street. But as Keeper of the Lockup, he oversaw the jail cells that were now located at the firehouse on Church Street.
In 1927, the town constructed new facilities for the highway department on Adelaide Street. The garages of the masonry building were meant to house the town’s work vehicles, but they soon took on another role. In 1919 and 1920, the Wilmington Fire Department obtained its first motorized vehicles, a Howe-Ford Pumper and a REO Brush Truck. It soon became apparent that the larger fire apparatus and the jail cells were incompatibly housed in the same building. By the late 1920s the lockup was again moved, this time to the new highway department garage. Chief Hill continued to keep an office at his residence and the cells remained at the garage until the Wilmington Police Department acquired its first police station in 1930, two hundred years after the appointment of Giles Roberts as constable.
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