On Semptember 19 the Massachusetts State Police Museum and Learning Center hosted the First Annual Vintage Police Car Show and Open House.
The event went from 12-4 p.m. and took place at the museum, which is a former Massachusetts State Police barracks and is located at 44 Worcester St. in Grafton. The museum took over the space after the barracks was moved to nearby Millbury which is larger and more up-to-date.
The police cruisers present were painted in various department colors from both the east and west coasts. Cruisers wearing colors from San Diego, California Sheriff’s Department, Maine State Police, and the Florida Highway Patrol represented the extremes of distances.
Some of the agencies represented also no longer exist, which was true for a 1980s Ford Crown Victoria police car wearing colors of the former Metropolitan Police which protected land managed by the Metropolitan District Commission, an agency that, along with two others, merged into what today is the Massachusetts State Police.
Police vehicle enthusiasts drooled over the cruisers which ranged in years from the 1940s to the 1990s. In addition to the agencies and years, the cruisers also represented various cars manufacturers.
In addition to showing off the various cruisers and two motorcycles, the museum itself was open for people to see.
The museum consists of various state police items including model Massachusetts State Police cars, riot control equipment, lots of old photographs, and plenty of other state police memorabilia.
The museum represents decades of history for the agency, which has been in existence since 1865. One of the items of note in the museum is the original teletype machine in one of the rooms. Today, troopers have the luxury of being able to write reports on laptops inside their police cars, but before that, troopers had to use teletype machines to communicate reports to the headquarters. Unfortunately for the writer, if another call came in, the writer would have to start from the beginning which made writing up large incident reports potentially very tedious.
One of the rooms that people were eagerly waiting to see was the former cell block which consists of two cells each complete with a heavy metal sliding door. Visitors took the opportunity to go inside the cell and share the room with a mannequin dressed in a striped jail suit and a wanted poster of James “Whitey” Bulger.
