Police deal with disorder

That’s how some of the townspeople felt during the years following the Civil War, when saloons became popular meeting places. In 1869, a petition was submitted at a town meeting, attesting to the problem of unrestricted and intemperate use of intoxicants by men visiting the saloons.

A committee of 10 was created to enforce the Sunday closing law and to stop the unlicensed sale of liquor. These committee members asked for the support of the town’s voters in “rescuing our fellow men from drunkards’ graves.”

Further, the voters at the meeting decided to build or rent a town lockup and purchase five pairs of handcuffs and shackles to be stored at the Town Clerk’s office.

This, perhaps, was the town’s first efforts at law enforcement. However well intentioned, the sale of unlicensed alcohol continued well through the 1870s and ’80s.

The saloons flourished; at one time in the early 1890s, there were 14 groceries in town and nine saloons.

The saloons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the working man’s club. There were occasional cries of local reformers, headed by a branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that Naugatuck had a problem on its hands.

Two of the popular saloons of the era were the ones operated by Thomas Neary, who in 1894, was the borough’s largest individual taxpayer; and Beirne’s Sample Room, a sort of present day cocktail lounge which was well ahead of its time.

Despite the occasional drunken brawl at the saloons in town, for 20 years there was no true police force. There was only one special constable who was appointed by the town to patrol the center in 1874. Town constables had been elected yearly from the town’s first beginnings in 1844, but this special constable was something new.

Finally, following construction of the New York and New England railroad to Waterbury, the town contemplated a more permanent move.

In 1890, a uniformed police force appeared for good.

— EILEEN K. EHMAN

Source: Special Edition of the Naugatuck Daily News (1844 - Naugatuck Sesquicentennial - 1944)