|
| |
|
Jails |
Old Jail
and County Home in 1885
The rectangular sandstone
structure, built in 1843, was used as the county jail, with
the brick building serving as the county home. They were on
South Broadway across from the courthouse. The jail moved in
1922 to new quarters next to the courthouse, where the present
City-County Safety Building is located.
The Summit
County's Second Jail
Built in 1902,
this sandstone structure looked more like a house of the
period than a jail and was widely acclaimed. There were living
quarters for the sheriff and cells for 100 prisoners. They
thought less of the jail than he did, calling it a "roach
paradise." It was razed in 1965 to make way for the
City-County Safety Building. This handsome structure was built
to replace the county's first jail, which had become notorious
for its inability to keep prisoners imprisoned.
On the
third of October, 1843 the four prisoners then in custody were
immediately transferred from their comparatively unsafe quarters
in the third story of the old stone block, to the supposed to
the "impregnable and perfectly secure quarters in the flea'
stone jail." Yet, notwithstanding its presumable
"non-break-out-ability," the very next night, those same four
prisoners liberated themselves with perfect ease in the
following ingenious manner: One of them, by the name of Garner
Miller, charged with "tinkering with the currency," was a
machinist by trade, and perfectly understood the principle and
power of leverage. He was not long in devising a plan for
testing that power, and his skills upon the walls of the new
jail. The beds of the prisoners were composed of a frame work of
strips of about 2x6 whitewood plank, with canvas nailed across
them. The side rails of the bunks were just about as long as the
space between the outer and the inner walls. Using one of these
bed rails horizontally as a lever, and another as a pry, with
the inner wall as the fulcrum, the united strength of the four
men readily pushed one of the huge blocks of sandstone entirely
out of the wall.
This defect was remedied, by drilling near the upper edge
of each stone, into about the middle of the tier below and
inserting iron dowels, and then filling the orifice with cement.
No escapes from that cause have been made since, many successful
attempts have been made by digging through the soft sandstone.
|
|
Rear of the Second
Summit County Jail
Photograph Archives. Cuyahoga
Falls Library, Cuyahoga Falls, OH.
Lane, Samuel A.
Fifty Years and Over, The History of Summit County. Beacon
Job Department, 1892. 528.
|
|
|
|
|
