Welcome To The Gogebic County Sheriff Department
HISTORY PAGE

On this page we will try to bring our visitors a bit of history about the Department and if we can, a few older photos as time goes on. We hope those history buffs who visit our site find this of interest and if any of our visitors has any old photographs of squad cars or the jail, etc. from the good old days, we will be happy to add them to this site. Thank you..

As you can see from the above list, our last Sheriff Don Pezzetti retired December 31st 2000 and will hold the record of 21 years as Sheriff in Gogebic County.

This being a somewhat newer page to our web site, we don't as yet have much to add to it, but hope that as time goes on we get to put in a few stories and photos of days gone past. Like the story about the old jail which was torn down in the 60's. At one time one of the old bay type cells had a hole in the floor which nobody paid much mind to. Then one day one of the officers took a walk through the basement and discovered a large pile of broken bottles on the floor. It was soon discovered that one of the windows to the cell with the hole in the floor was not very secure - so from time to time an inmate who was on day parole and was free to come and go in the building would make his way to the local store to buy a few bottles of booze. This inmate before going to work would lower a string through the window and would upon returning tie the bottle to it and later pull the string with the attached bottle up to the second floor and into his cell. The inmates must have had a good old time on the weekend and dropped the empty bottles through the hole in the floor to the basement..

As you can see from the above story, things were much differant in the old days. Nowadays cellblocks are much more secure, we run frequent shakedowns of inmates cells and officers conduct much more frequent patrols through the cellblock. (In the old days it was routine procedure for the night man at the jail to also do janitorial chores and when finished he would sack out on a cot for the night after locking the building up and the inmates would not be checked on until morning.)

Speaking of sacking out. Did you know that for many years the Sheriff and his family often lived in the jail? This was true of many of the smaller Sheriff Departments in Michigan. In fact the Gogebic County Sheriff lived in the same building our current jail is located in until the early 80's when Sheriff Pezzetti and his family moved out and the quarters area of the building was converted to office space, an evidence room and our RDSS juvenile holding room.

Unknown Persons by Old Squad - date unknown ..... Sheriff Sanders as Deputy in 1978

Today we take for granted the local Secretary of State branch offices where we go to get our Drivers License and vehicle License Plates. But not that many years ago, Sheriff and local Police Departments issued both of these items. It was usually done only on certain days of the week and the departments kept the records with certain plate series being issued to specific counties. In those days, if an officer came across a car with a license plate he needed to check on, they determined which county had issued the plate and officers would have to call by phone or radio the other jurisdiction that issued the plate to find out who it belonged to. Today, officers only need to radio the office and the desk officer or dispatcher types the plate number into the LEIN computer system and within seconds the SOS computer down in Lansing sends us back all the information we need on a vehicle and it's owner. We also use the LEIN system the same way to run drivers license information, warrant checks and out of state vehicle and driver information. Today all aspects of law enforcement has been enhanced by the computer age...

Well, we hope you have learned a bit about us in reviewing this history page. As time goes on we hope to share more stories with you and as always, if you have any comments about this page, please feel free to E-mail me at the link below. Thank you.

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