Tucked away between the Pilot Point’s Police Department and City Hall is a stalwart guardian from the city’s past. A vault, leftover from the days when the Pilot Point National Bank operated on the downtown Square, now protects city records instead of cash and coin.
Intricate molding paints the date of the vault’s installation to 1892 — the same year the bank set up shop at the corner of Main and Jefferson. The door itself is metal and imposing, with heavy deadbolts and combination locks barring entrance to the safe housed behind it.
The steady old door held its contents securely for most of the bank’s history in the building, with the exception of one early morning in 1932.
Before dawn on Feb. 6, 1932, three armed men used bottles of nitroglycerin to open the small round door of the safe inside the vault. The explosion blew the vault door off of its hinges and released $8,000 in cash and $11,000 in registered Liberty bonds to the robbers.
The heist was well planned, according to a 1932 edition of The Post-Signal. The men, masked and armed, blew into town before 1 a.m. and cut telephone wires and the fire alarm — anything residents could use to call for help. By around 1:15 a.m., the men had captured W.E. Montgomery, Pilot Point’s night watchman.
“This was before we had police,” said City Historian Jay Melugin. “These [three] men came up to him and said they were out of gas. So he told them he would try to help him out and then they pulled a gun on him.
“They told him never mind about the gasoline.”
The robbers then collected bank cashier Earl Selz and his wife, and assistant cashier J.W. Peel and his wife. A baker who stumbled upon the scene was also taken hostage and the group was forced to accompany the robbers to the bank to open the vault.
The safe, however, was on a time lock, said Melugin. That meant that it would remain closed until a predetermined time allowed it to open.
“Mr. Selz explained that to them, that there was no way he could open it even if he wanted to until the appropriate time, which was 8 o’clock the next morning,” Melugin explained. “That didn’t sit well with them so they drilled holes and planted [nitroglycerin] in there and blew it up. Scattered shrapnel all over the inside of the bank. Didn’t hurt anybody.”
The robbers made off with the cash and bonds and the hostages were allowed to go free. To this day, no hint of the men’s identities has been found.
The bank’s losses were covered by insurance and the institution opened for business the next day. Melugin said that whispers of an inside man have always surrounded the event, though he doesn’t pay much attention to such stories.
“I kind of take that with a grain of salt,” he said. “People in the 1930s didn’t like bankers. They didn’t like people that had money because everybody was poor. It was the Depression.”
The vault was repaired and made secure again until the bank’s relocation to Washington Street in 1966, Melugin said. During that move, the bank offered their old building to the city in exchange for a small frame house on Jefferson Street that had functioned as City Hall.
“When the bank moved, they swapped with the city. They traded the city that building on The Square for the little building over there on Jefferson Street,” Melugin said. “City Hall moved in to the bank building.”
The city’s headquarters remained there until 2003, when the city’s current offices and council chambers were completed.
Now, the vault that once stored people’s valuables and life savings holds the municipal history of Pilot Point.
“All of our city records are stored there — all of the minutes of all of the council meetings ever since 1906,” said Melugin. “We’ve got all of the minutes, all of the city ordinances, all of the original books. Most of the early ones are hand-written. It’s very interesting.”
In addition to old city codes and ordinances, Melugin stores city artifacts in the vault as they wait for their final home in a Pilot Point museum.
The vault continues to guard that valuable history as it has always done, behind an intricate deadbolt on a heavy, solid door.
This article originally appeared in the Pilot Point Post-Signal.
Heather Michelle Tipton 