“Members of the Town Board unanimously agreed to repeal a law that prevented grocery stores, markets and other businesses from selling booze. The change means the town’s tipplers will no longer be relegated to hotels, restaurants and beer gardens for their libation.
“Prohibition is lifted in Duanesburg,” proclaimed Supervisor Rene Merrihew last week.
Not that anyone ever realized there was a town law prohibiting the corner gas station from selling six-packs. Not even the town’s old-timers could recall a time when local businesses adhered to the nearly 77-year-old law that was finally scrapped in February.
“If there was such an ordinance, people never paid any attention to it,” said Norm Collins, a former Delaware and Hudson worker who has lived in the town since 1942.
Former councilman and longtime county legislator Dave Vincent said he never heard of the ordinance, despite having sold beer from the Countryside Mart for more than 35 years. He said Gideon Wilbur — the man who converted the old barn into a service station in 1923 — also made it a practice to sell beer from the adjoining general store for as long as he could recall.
“No one I’ve ever interacted with in any capacity knew about these laws,” he said. “Clearly, the practice in the town has been contrary to them.”
But the law was prevalent enough at one point that it made its way onto the deed of a swath of farmland at the intersection of Route 20 and Route 30. The land was in the process of being purchased by a private development company looking to build a Hannaford Supermarket at the bustling corner, when the language came into question.
Hannaford sells alcoholic beverages at most of its supermarkets and wasn’t planning to make an exception in Duanesburg. So when the company’s attorneys read that the property they were developing could not “be used, or any part thereof, for the sale, dispensing, manufacturing or preparation of alcoholic beverages of any name or nature,” they decided to ask what local covenants might prohibit them from having a beer aisle.
“That sort of led to discovering there was an ordinance from even before the title was issued,” explained Hannaford spokesman Michael Norton. “If that note hadn’t been on the title we wouldn’t have known either.”
The archaic law sets forth a process by which town officials would grant licenses to wholesalers and retailers for selling alcohol. Under the ordinance, only the owner of a “bona fide hotel, restaurant, beer garden or club” could apply for the permit.
Wholesale licenses were offered for $10 per month, while businesses selling alcohol for on-premise consumption were billed $5 per month. Special exceptions were made for the sale of alcohol at “picnics and clambakes,” provided the seller paid a fee set “as the [town] board may fix.”
Former town Justice of the Peace James Drufee offered the ordinance and it was passed unanimously in December 1932. The law took effect just three months before President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Cullen-Harrison Act, which allowed the manufacture and sale of beer with an alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent; Prohibition was officially repealed in December 1933.
The state Legislature then took up regulating the sale of alcohol by creating the State Liquor Authority in 1934. This change effectively superseded the town’s regulatory authority, thereby making the “ordinance relating to the sale of beer and other alcoholic non-intoxicating beverages” moot, if not unconstitutional.
Yet the ordinance never seemed to make it off the town’s law books, even though there’s no evidence it was ever enforced. Some suggest this longevity may be testament to Duanesburg’s reputation as being one of the more conservative towns in Schenectady County during the 1930s.
“The overall character of the town certainly was [conservative],” said Duanesburg Historian Arthur Willis. “In my own memories during the early 1950s, some people were still grateful that Joe McCarthy was serving in the Senate.”
It’s possible the reserved nature of the town may have prevented them from repealing any laws aimed at keeping raucous elements out of Duanesburg. Merrihew said another town ordinance forbids dancing on Sundays, a legislation that was likely aimed at Duanesburg’s dance halls and speakeasies.
“And that one is still on the books today,” she said.”
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Mason, Jason. Schenectady Daily Gazette 6 April 2009.