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Frontier Jailsby
Bob Bowman | |
A
lawyer friend from Tyler
did something a few years ago I've always wanted to do. He turned his local jail
into a place to work.
Randy Gilbert took a lot of ribbing about wanting
to become a honest-to-goodness jailhouse lawyer, but he stuck to his guns and
restored the 1880’s Smith County jail as an office for his practice.
There
are a lot of jails like the old Tyler calaboose all over East
Texas and, thankfully, jailhouse restorations are happening with increasing
frequency these days in East Texas.
People
just naturally have an affinity for their jails, so in places like Hemphill,
Coldspring, Carthage,
Center, Fairfield,
Jasper and Lufkin,
they've raised money through bake sales and county fairs to bring their own jails
back to life as museums and historical archives.
There will probably be
more restorations down the road, too, since the state has gotten tougher on jail
standards.
My
favorite jail in East Texas is at
Coldspring. Built in 1871,
it now houses the San Jacinto County musuem, but when I first found the jail in
the l960s, it had changed little since it was built. It was heated with wood stoves
and had its original iron cells. It also had a trapdoor for hangings, but was
sealed after only one hanging. |
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| Another jailhouse
museum stands in Fairfield.
Now more than 130 years old, it owes part of its fame to the fact that John Wesley
Hardin, Texas' best known gunfighter, once spent the night here while being transported
from Waco to Austin.
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Panola County had
been trying for years to turn its old jail into a museum and finally made it on
the jail's 100th anniversary in 1991.
It was from the old jail that one
of East Texas' most ingenious jailbreaks occurred. Four prisoners, housed on the
second floor, were said to have used a ragged razor blade to cut through an iron
plate covering a level mechanism controlling their cell door. |
Not far from Carthage,
in the Shelby County seat of Center,
townspeople turned their 1885 jail into a tourist center and chamber of commerce
building.
In Lufkin, we
relinquished the Angelina County jail on the top floor of a new
courthouse in the 1950s to allow local historians to house the county's archives.
An earlier jail is used by the county as an annex. |
Historic
jail in Hemphill, now a museum
Photo courtesy George Lester, April 2004 |
The old Sabine County
jail in Hemphill, also a museum,
has one of the few hanging towers left on an East Texas jail. When it was built
in 1903, Texas executions were carried out at the county seats rather than at
the prison in Huntsville,
so the builder made provisions for Sabine County's hangings to occur in grand
style.
Jasper County’s jail was built in the 1930s as a depression-era
Works Project Administration project. It served Jasper County 50 years until a
new, modern jail was built. The old jail now houses the Jasper County archives,
a repository for county historical and genealogical research materials.
The
pioneer jails of East
Texas, which look like they’ve stepped out of an old western film, represent
a colorful part of Texas history,
and it’s nice to see a growing movement to preserve these old buildings. |
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