Honoring firsts

Ed Overstreet walked into the Winter Park Police Department Saturday morning to deliver a gun that hadn’t been used in decades, carrying a history almost older than the city itself.

It belonged to his grandfather, D.C. Overstreet, a tough man who turned in his badge in 1927 after serving as the city’s marshal and first police chief for nearly two decades.

On the second floor of the imposing stone police headquarters, down a long, winding hallway, that brass chief’s badge, still gleaming, lay upon a table next to a small collection of police weaponry frozen in time from the turn of the 20th century.

Ushering Overstreet around a corner, Sgt. Jon Askins showed him an homage to his grandfather for the first time, as he laid the city’s first chief’s personal revolver on a knee-height table next to a gray photo of a steel-eyed man standing rigid in a U.S. marshal’s three-piece suit.

Saturday morning brought the quiet revelation of the plan that had been put into effect the day that Chief Brett Railey rose to the department’s highest rank on May 1, 2009. Winter Park’s Police Department finally has its own history museum.

“I wanted to make sure our history didn’t slip away,” Railey said, standing a few feet from a small table with fading sepia photographs of the city’s first police force.

All of that group had long since passed. But filling the hallway next to cases filled with history, a family four generations deep gathered to remember a man who had helped keep the peace in a fledgling town in uncertain times at the turn of the century.

Mike Overstreet, now much older than the man wearing the chief’s badge in the worn photograph at his side, said he only knew his grandfather through stories.

“They said he was very firm, but he did an awful lot to help a lot of people,” Mike said. “He was well-liked.”

The town’s first chief would start the town’s first official police force — with a total of one officer — before World War I began.

Established when handcuffs were still fastened together with a metal pin and a police baton was made from leather and barely longer than a pencil, Winter Park’s police force slowly grew to have its first traffic officer, as the Ford was ushering forth the Model T and roads were still mostly dirt.

That history had been hard to come by, as officers became historical researchers to unearth the town’s past, locked away in closets and in storage rooms.

Askins, along with Railey, Officer Lina Strube and a small group of officers, slowly pieced together the collection of newspaper clippings, memorabilia and police equipment, assembled into a “museum” that they said will one day fill the length of the 100-foot-long hallway.

Along the way, the community stepped in to help. Susan Godorov, a property manager, found a collection of watch display cases in an abandoned store. Now those dark wood and polished steel cases, renovated and refinished by Askins, line the hallway. The exhibit will open to the public soon.

Standing in front of one of them, Ed Overstreet said he was proud to be a part of preserving the city’s history.

“This is outstanding,” he said. “It’s a nice remembrance.”