by Scott Wheeler editor of Vermont's Northland Journal

Bert Curran (back center) served as the police chief of the short-lived Derby Line Police Department during the mid-twentieth century. Those who remember him recall that he was a fair man who treated everybody equally.

Today Derby Line is known as a peaceful, picturesque village located on the Vermont/Quebec border. Lined with stately old homes, and Baxter Park serving as its centerpiece, today it’s difficult to imagine that in past decades the village was so busy that it needed a police department. The man who led that department, Bert Curran, wasn’t a heavy-handed enforcer; instead, he was a man who believed that most people were generally good, and who treated even lawbreakers with respect.
“We like to brag about our dad because we’re very proud of him,” Curran’s daughter Arlene Mosher of Derby said. Mosher, the oldest of three sisters, middle sister Pauline Roderer of Florida, and the baby of the family, Virginia Lawrence of Derby Line, shared a few memories of their father. They talked lovingly about their father, a man who passed away in 1982 just short of his ninetieth birthday.
People are attracted to law enforcement for a number of reasons. Some want to try to make the world a safer place and to help people, while others do it for the benefit of their own egos. Apparently it was World War II and belief in his community that transformed Curran, a former logger and farmer, into a gruff but lovable figure in the border community.
Although born in Holland, Curran spent many of his early years in the lumber camps of Essex County, Vermont, and deep within the big forests of New Hampshire and Maine in the days of the big log drives. His father, John, logged while his mother, Margaret (Walker) Curran, cooked. The family traveled from one camp to another following the work.
“Dad grew up very quickly out there,” Lawrence said. With the days of the big log drives coming to an end, and by that time having children of his own, and in his early 30s, he went into farming with his parents.

window.google_render_ad();

Curran was married twice during his life. When his first wife, Rosie (Washburn) Curran, died he eventually married her sister, Nancy.
When World War II rolled around Curran wanted to do something for his country but he was past recruitment age. Lawrence said that her father was hired on June 1, 1942 as a guard at Butterfields, a tool manufacturer that still does business in Derby Line today, but under the name of Tivoly. His job was to protect the factory from possible espionage and sabotage.
“When he was there he was very strict,” Mosher chuckled, thinking back to the time that she thought she could bypass her father’s rules at the plant when they both worked there. Before entering the plant, everybody passing through the front gate had to tell Curran their security number. Arlene found out the hard way that meant her, too. “When I came through one day, I walked right by him. He said, ‘Girl, what’s your number?’”
“I said, ‘Dad, you know my number.’”
“I said, ‘What’s your number?’” he demanded of his daughter.
Realizing her father wasn’t going to let her go to work until she gave her number, she finally gave him the information he’d asked for, and he let her pass. She said he was known to do the same thing to his superiors. Nobody was too important for him to stop and question. He treated the laborers and the administration with the same rules and dignity. His duties as a guard ended soon after the end of the war, but Lawrence said her father stayed on until February 19, 1950, working various positions in the factory while at the same time beginning his duties as a police officer.
It’s difficult to tell by looking at the village’s Main Street today, but at one time the port of entry into the country located on the north end of Main Street was the busiest in Vermont. Those were the days before Interstate 91 was built, in the late 1960s and early 70s, to serve as a major bypass around the village. Until the interstate opened, all the vehicles entering and exiting the country at Derby Line went right through the village, making the village a bustling community, but a community with a big traffic problem.
“Derby Line used to be a pretty going place,” Roderer said. “It was a happy place.”
Although the women couldn’t say for sure, they seemed to think their father was hired as the village’s first police officer in the mid-1940s. In time, he became the chief that oversaw four or five officers who joined the ranks of the department. Curran equipped his personal car with lights and a siren.

Traffic jams such as this one were a familiar sight in Derby Line in the days before the construction of I-91

Although the officers responded to criminal complaints, their major duty involved keeping the traffic flowing smoothly through the village, especially during the summer vacation season when it wasn’t unusual for the line of traffic trying to enter Quebec to stretch all the way up Main Street and beyond. At times travelers were forced to wait upwards of three hours to cross the border, the sisters said. To make their wait more comfortable, they said children often went from car to car selling soda. Village officials were particularly concerned that the officers make it possible for locals to move about the community, especially to Butterfields, that, like today, was the community’s largest employer.
He treated everybody the same, rich or poor, the sisters agreed. He certainly didn’t base his law enforcement decisions on a person’s name, even if it was his own daughters. Roderer remembered her father gruffly telling her, “Girl, you know if you’re out with your friends and you get in any trouble, you don’t think just because you’re my daughter that you’re going to get out of it because you’re not. I’ll pick you up just as fast as anybody else.” They recalled that their father once stopped their mother, his wife, for defective equipment and told her to get the car off the road.
“He used to always tell us kids if you start out stealing pins and needles, you’ll end up stealing horses and cows,” Roderer said. “He was so stern but he was actually as gentle as a kitten. Oh, didn’t he sound mean! But there wasn’t anybody in this world who could be kinder. He’d take in anybody who didn’t have a job or didn’t have a place until they could find a job.”
“He was the type of person who would pick up someone and on the way to jail he’d stop, get them a cup of coffee, and pick up a pack of cigarettes,” Lawrence added. He could arrest a person, bring him to jail, and walk away with a new friend. There was nobody who loved to joke more than he did.” The sisters added that their father was particularly fond of children. Although he wasn’t afraid to give the village’s children a hard time when they needed it, they said he was more concerned with teaching them a lesson they’d remember the rest of their lives than a criminal record they’d also have to live with forever.
The old chief also was known to have a high tolerance for people who had a habit of making a nuisance of themselves around town. One such man who came to his daughters’ minds was a Quebec man by the name of Charles (Dimmer) Davio. They told how each fall Davio crossed the border to smash a storefront window, then wait for Curran to arrive. According to Curran’s daughters, Davio pulled this stunt each fall to get into his annual winter residence—a jail cell.
The following is a portion of a news article that appeared in the December 4, 1958 issue of the Stanstead Journal:

Dimmer Does it Again; Gets Two to Three Years

Charles (Dimmer) Davio, of Rock Island, arranged for his winter residence in the usual way on Saturday night when he broke the glass in the door of the Gilmore Brothers store at Derby Line, entered the building and sat down to wait.
Davio didn’t have long to wait. Some of the neighbors, awakened by the shattering of glass, contacted Chief of Police Bert Curran, and by 11:30 Dimmer was on his way to the Orleans County jail at Newport…. The method is always the same. Dimmer goes to Derby Line, smashes a window in a store, enters and waits to be picked up. He has a record of broken windows at Caswell and O’Rourke store, Ames’ Garage, the former Gerry Hunt Store and Gilmore Brothers.

Little money came along with the chief’s position. Curran’s daughters found records to indicate that during a period in 1959 he made between $20 and $35 each week. In addition, he was occasionally able to pick up other jobs associated with law enforcement for a few extra dollars to supplement his income. For example, on May 1 of the same year the state paid him $4.40 for delivering a state warrant. And they found another document showing that he was paid $6.80 to travel to Newport to serve as a witness in a case. Although the money wasn’t great, the sisters pointed out that things didn’t cost as much back than, so people could live on a whole lot less money, and besides that, he loved doing what he did.

Kelly’s Cabins were popular for people passing through Derby Line. The cabins are long gone.

In addition to serving as chief of the department, he was also a deputy sheriff, Curran’s daughters said. He policed dances in the dancehalls that dotted northern Orleans County. But one of his favorite activities beyond his role as chief was riding along on patrol with the state troopers, men such as Bill Green and Ted Hislop. He loved to show the new troopers the area and introduce them to the people. And, they said he wasn’t afraid to tell them to lighten up when he thought a new trooper was being too harsh on people, causing more trouble than they stopped.

Come the late 1950s, there was big talk in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom about plans to build Interstate 91, an interstate which, once completed, would stretch from Brattleboro to Derby Line, diverting much of the nonlocal traffic around villages such as Derby Line. Although the sisters couldn’t say for sure, they seemed to recall that the village’s department was disbanded in about 1969, about the time the interstate was preparing to open for traffic. But that was far from the end of Curran’s career. For many years, well into old age, he patrolled the Derby Port Drive-In that was on the Derby Road in Derby between the 1950s and 1980s. During the 1970s he also worked as a security guard at Mammoth Mart, a discount store that was located in the building that now houses Shaws Supermarket on the Derby, Road.
The old lawman passed away on March 25, 1982, after decades of hard work and dedication to his family and community.

Aliens Taken At Gunpoint by Derby Line Police Chief

Two young Canadians were taken into custody at gunpoint by Chief of Police Bert Curran of Derby Line last Thursday, when they attempted to enter the United States illegally via the Aldrich Road east of the village.
Arnold James MacCallum of Prince Edward Island, and James Clifton Forrester of Sydney, Nova Scotia, were spotted traveling south on the back roads and Immigration authorities at Derby line were notified. As no border patrolmen were available at the moment, Chief Curran was asked to investigate.
Residents in the area were asked to keep watch and within a short time a local farmer reported that he had seen the men. Chief Curran went to the scene immediately, but the men refused to give themselves up, even after two warning shots had been fired into the ground near them. They made their escape into the small cedar swamp at the edge of the Ira Aldrich farm.
Circling the swamp as quickly as possible, Chief Curran was waiting for the men when they emerged on the other side, and this time there was no fooling. He warned them to come out with their hands up or he would shoot to kill. They came out and were taken in and turned over to the Immigration authorities. Previous to this there had been a short scuffle with an unarmed, off duty border patrolman, but the men broke away and reached the woods.
The two men were sent from Derby Line to St. Albans, where they will face charges of illegal entry into the United States. It was found that MacCallum had previously been arrested for armed robbery and was on probation. He had already been picked up for illegal entry into the country in 1956 at Malone, New York and had been allowed voluntary departure.
This is not Chief Bert’s first encounter with convicted criminals. In 1955 he took into custody Leo Nault, who had abandoned a station wagon near the Spencer factory, which later proved to have been stolen. He was later found to be an escaped convict from Lewiston, Maine.

From May 9, 1930 issue of the Newport Express and Standard:

Derby Line Heads List
Handling Record Amount of Traffic According to Customs Report

Highway travel into the Vermont Customs district for the month of April more than doubted as compared with the corresponding period a year ago. Collector Harry C. Whitehill, in issuing his monthly report of such travel, states that 23,269 cars, carrying an aggregate of 69,184 passengers, were inspected at the various ports and stations in his district during the month. while only 11,166 cars, carrying 31,721 passengers were examined during April 1929. As compared with the record March of this year, the figures for April also show an increase of about 85 percent.
More than one-third of all the cars arriving in the district entered through the port of Derby Line, where 8,057 cars were examined during the month. The highway through Swanton was also a busy one during April, that station having reported the examination of 5,507 cars. Reports from other ports and stations in the district show that 2,497 cars were examined at Richford; 1,518 at North Troy; 1,481 at Canaan; 1,453 at Beecher Fall; 996 at Norton Mills; 800 at Alburg; 370 at West Bershire; 311 at East Richford; and 279 at ports on less frequented routes.

Indications of an early resumption of tourist travel are reflected in registration plates of outside states or of the various Canadian provinces, such visiting cars making up approximately forty-five percent of the cars entering the district during April The number of cars of Canadian registration recorded during the month was 7,871, and those from states outside of Vermont numbered 2,516, while the number of cars of Vermont registration was 12,882.