Tennessee State Penitentiary

By Yoshie Lewis and Brian Allison

As Tennessee grew into a modern state, it found itself increasingly beset by crime. In 1831, the legislature approved the construction of the first penitentiary. The pen world was violent and dark, with several major riots, fires, and escape attempts throughout the years. However, the prison also gave birth to a culture of creativity born from despair, with entertainment shows often featuring the biggest names in country music sharing the stage with inmate bands. The best-known pen, “the Castle,” has become a familiar icon to filmgoers, being used in productions like The Last Castle and The Green Mile. Today, the building sits abandoned, facing an uncertain future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Oct 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781439647813

Yoshie Lewis

Yoshie Lewis has authored two previous publications with Arcadia, Then and Now: Lorton and Images of America: Muscle Shoals. She has a BA in art history from the University of California and a MA in producing film and video from the American University. She enjoys using these in her career as a producer and writer. Brian Allison is Nashville born and raised and has worked in the public history field for many years, most recently as the curator of Travellers Rest Plantation. He is a museum design consultant, a graphic artist, and a writer.

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Allison

INTRODUCTION

The Tennessee State Penitentiary is an unlikely celebrity. Many who are familiar with its cold gray walls have come to know it through popular movies such as The Green Mile or The Last Castle, standing in for whatever fictional forbidding old ramshackle prison the filmmakers need to portray.

However, the prison is a very real place with its own story. It served the state of Tennessee for over 90 years as its primary prison facility. The men, women, and children who served time here, and the officials who watched over them, had their own stories, most of which remain untold. Some of them rival the best fiction that authors can produce.

Completed in 1898, the state penitentiary was considered a triumph of modern design and science and a vast improvement over the facility it replaced. The striking gray stone facade remains today, a testament to its Victorian origins. The elegant turrets and arched windows lend it an air both attractive and forbidding. More than one witness was reminded of a medieval European fortress, and even today many know the place by its enduring nickname—the Castle.

Behind the silent walls, however, was a world unto itself, as inmates learned when they walked into the cellblocks in the penitentiary’s early years. They passed under a large sign that loomed overhead, stating Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, a jarring reminder that they were the property of the state for the foreseeable future.

The world that they entered was primitive and terrifying. The food was barely edible, and mindless violence occurred at the hands of both guards and inmates. For much of the early years, the inmates were condemned to work as little better than slave labor in factories that leased them from the state. The prisoners were expected to meet their assigned task or be beaten. Among themselves, convicts said, there were three choices: meet the quota, take the whipping, or escape. Or, as they crudely put it It was task, ass, or over the wall. Conditions were the same at the other disciplinary institutions run by the state.

The story of the penitentiary is a story of conflict, of the constant struggle in the hands of officials to maintain control over many dangerous men, balanced with the task of not dehumanizing them. It is a tale of the difficult task of corrections officers who needed to learn how to maintain control without becoming brutal themselves but who were at the constant risk of violence at any time. And finally, it is the lore of the prisoners, trying to do their time, keep their sanity, maintain peace with their keepers and fellow inmates, and survive the many mindless and cheerless days. It was a struggle that many on both sides would lose.

The old prison finally closed its doors in 1989 as newer, more modern facilities took its place. Almost immediately, controversy arose over the future of the building, and the argument continues to this day. Some maintain that the sheer historical value of the architecture, the delicate stonework that so defines it as a place of another era, should not be destroyed. Its form speaks of an artistry that is long lost today, when even so functional a building as a prison should display such elegance.

However, the world contained within the walls of the penitentiary is not a pleasant one, and others counter with the argument that the bloody and horrific events, haunting the prison for its entire existence, far overshadow any possible value in its stones. They raise a valid point: why should a place of such sadness, misery, and pain be remembered at all?

Historians must remember that the past is the past, and that the stories that are the most compelling are not always the happiest. As chroniclers of the stories of men and women who came before, it should always be remembered that some good comes from the worst of places, even if the lesson is how not to repeat the sins of earlier times.

In many ways, the Castle stands as a monument to the marginalized and the forgotten. There are those who died terrible and unrecorded deaths, such as Paul Joseph Payne, who was murdered in 1939 in the metal shop and whose remains were not found for 15 years. There are others who demonstrated that art and beauty can come from even the depths of despair, such as the five members of the Prisonaires, who found a brief moment of musical immortality with their hit, Just Walkin’ In the Rain. While some were destroyed physically and mentally by their time here, others found redemption and rebuilt their shattered lives. Horace Woodruff, convicted of the cold-blooded murder of a Nashville policeman in 1931, came into the prison as a young hellion, bound for the electric chair. He acquired an education during a long life in captivity, and after 32 years he was pardoned, living out the rest of his years in quiet obscurity. The memoir he penned, Stone Wall College, stands as a stark statement both of the pain he inflicted and that which he endured.

One

UNCERTAIN BEGINNINGS

EARLY TENNESSEE

The original Tennessee State Penitentiary served the state for nine decades in war and peace. This photograph shows it looking deceptively tidy and peaceful around the year 1880. Little remains of this complex today, which was located near the modern I-40 overpass on Church Street in Nashville. (Courtesy of Nashville Public Library.)

Justice before 1830 was dispensed in backwoods courtrooms like this in front of judges who often made up in common sense what they lacked in education. This image depicts a later scene, the trial of a horse thief in Kansas,