Yeah, the same opening paragraph you’ve read before. Some of these pictures were posted originally
with the travel blog write-up (original link below). Now instead of a select few, I’m sharing just
about all the pictures. Some blurry or
bad shots were removed, as well as some with others who would appreciate not
having their pictures posted again.
Please be sure to visit the original blog link for more details of the
original visit.
Back in the frontier days, the jail houses were small, as there
weren’t many offenders. Post-Civil War,
many establishments no longer had the room to hold their prisoners, so new ones
were constructed. This was an example of
one. Built in 1875, this replaced the
previous smaller jail house. In an early
form of multi-tasking, the Warden and his family lived in the back of the jail
in rather nice quarters. The front of
the building was dedicated to holding inmates.
The cells themselves were huge iron boxes, with many individual rooms
within. It’s like your dorm suite, with
each person having their own room, and the small group having a common
area. Since they were in the center of
the room, it reduced any chance of escape … and the guards could wander around
the construct. Just from stepping
inside, one could tell the ventilation sucked, so it must’ve been like an oven
in those hot Texas summers.
The jail house was also designed with on-site facilities for
cooking meals, dentist, hair-cuts, and such.
This was also the era of “chain gangs,” so excepting when it was really
rainy out, the inmates were probably outside doing back-breaking work as much
as they were locked in. Still, it was
interesting to see what the early form of prisons looked like.
https://traveljournalbydave.blogspot.com/2014/04/milam-county-jail-cameron-tx-and-elgin.html
