Charles McCabe: A Lifetime of Service
Have you ever committed a crime? Have you ever had an interaction with a police officer? Even if you haven’t, you could agree that it’s not easy to be a cop. It takes a certain personality to want to uphold the law in any situation. It also takes guts to walk into dangerous conditions. You also have to know every nook and cranny of the terrain you serve and to understand its people. Imagine doing that in the days before 911, with walkie-talkies and video surveillance all over the place! One man managed to do it for over 30 years and earned the respect of everyone, even the people he arrested.
Charles McCabe was born in 1859 into a Catholic household here in Poughkeepsie. His parents came from Ireland, and he regularly partook in the activities at his church, Saint Peters. His first job was working on the railroad as a brakeman, where it was said he made a study of “tramps” as they made their way up to Poughkeepsie from New York City. He joined the Poughkeepsie Police Department in August of 1883 around the same time the Board of Police Commissioners was established. In his early years, he found himself handling cases of vagrants living in abandoned buildings, drunks in the streets, and captured troublemakers committing crimes like petty theft.
In 1900, he became the first Chief of Police appointed not through political means but by earning the position through hard work and scoring high on a civil service exam. In 1901, he found himself handling a wild case when he answered a call from a shocked husband named James Collins. Collins claimed that his wife had shot at him twice (and missed) because he had been having an affair. While at the scene, the wife was kind enough to inform McCabe of her husband’s detailed plan to commit several robberies along Main Street by blowing open safes and making away with the cash. She also informed him of her husband’s plan to rob Mr. James Keith of the Phoenix Horse Shoe Works, as he had been watching Keith make the rounds from the Nelson House to his shop. Chief McCabe arrested Collins and not the wife.
McCabe found himself on the scene of a horrible murder in 1910 when he and other officers were called to Millbrook to investigate the scene at the Compton Estate. There, a 25-year-old governess named Sara Brymer had been assaulted and strangled to death. McCabe questioned the coachman, Mr. Frank Schermerhorn, at the scene and could not help but notice the young man’s odd behavior. When Schermerhorn walked off to his cottage on the property, McCabe followed shortly after to get more information to find the coachman attempting to take his own life by slitting his throat. When he failed, McCabe brought him back to Poughkeepsie and watched over him at Vassar Hospital, where he was able to get a confession.
McCabe lived at 62 Delafield Street and had been married twice in his life his first wife Annie died in 1905 after having 8 children (3 of which survived). He married Elizabeth Sullivan in 1908, and she lived until 1940. He would continue to serve in his role until he died in 1921 from heart failure. During his time as Chief of Police it was noted that the number of burglaries had dropped and the amount of “tramps” coming from the trains into the city. It was almost as if a warning had gone out that Poughkeepsie’s police didn’t tolerate trouble in their city under McCabe’s watch.
References:
“The Chief of Police that prevents crime” by Jackson Harding, The American City, Vol 3 – 1910
Poughkeepsie Eagle News: 18 Jan 1887, 25 May 1900, 5 Jun 1900, 4 Sep 1901, 13 Oct 1937
Sunday Courier: 3 July 1921
Ancestry.com records
Images:
P1LD22- Photo of Police Chief Charles McCabe, 1905
https://mainandmarket.poklib.org/digital/collection/police/id/65/rec/12
P14LD22 – Interior shot of the Poughkeepsie police station, 1890 https://mainandmarket.poklib.org/digital/collection/police/id/61/rec/2
