Perhaps the most impressive institutional building in the entire state, the old Ohio Penitentiary stood on Spring Street just west of downtown Columbus for 164 years, from 1834 until 1998.
The first inmates who marched across the river from the original log-built prison in 1834 arrived at an edifice barely begun. A wall circumscribed the grounds, as it would until nearly the end of the following century. Inmates built their own stone cellhouses on the 22-acre site allocated along Spring Street at North Street. This included a separate facility for women, completed in 1837 within the main wall. Women were incarcerated here, separately within the same facility, until 1913, when the new women's prison opened at Marysville.
Not long after the original prisoners arrived the Pen began to grow rapidly, after a model established by Philadelphia's Eastern State. The prison was nearly as old as the new capital city. It was an era of prisons built in the middle of big cities--or what would become big cities. Columbus barely qualified as a city at all, but it was the planned and laid-out capital of Ohio, after Chillicothe and Zanesville had their turns. One of the first projects to make use of convict labor was the marble State House less than a mile away.
At that time the Ohio Penitentiary functioned as a federal and territorial prison as well; no federal prison system existed outside the use of state facilities. Ohio was a western state, and as such accepted many prisoners from the distant plains, deserts, mountains, and Pacific sea coast; inmates from the territories were brought in up the river or via roads and canals--then, later on, by train. A railroad bridge across the Scioto brought nearly all convicts directly to their new home.
The Penitentiary's heyday was perhaps the years around 1900, when it was something of a tourist attraction, and held up as a "model" prison--largely due to the efforts of Warden E.G. Coffin (1896-1900). Coffin was a nationally recognized expert on penology; he traveled the nation touring jails and prisons and offering his expertise to state boards and panels of review. His speeches and essays were even published in book form, though how much of this was simply the result of rigorous self-promotion is hard to say.
Whichever it was, the Pen became a point of pride to the city and the state, and was featured in tours and sold on postcards. It remained a popular stop on tours of Columbus, as well as a major employer and a visual landmark of the riverfront and downtown. In 1908 it was described as the world's largest prison by H.M. Fogle. (His wonderful book on the prison, and its executed criminals, can be read by visiting my page about (and transcription of) Palace of Death.)
Not surprisingly, the reality of the Penitentiary was immensely different from the image civic leaders wanted to project--for the guards and superintendents as well as the convicts. Overcrowding was a problem nearly from the start. Disease ran rampant; rats and insects were ever present inhabitants, and the efficiency with which they conducted disease throughout the facility could be overwhelming. In 1849, for instance, a cholera epidemic burned through the prison, killing 121 in just a few short months. As long as it all stayed inside, and didn't affect the good citizens of the city, no one worried much about conditions behind the walls.
Built to hold 1,500 prisoners, the institution exceeded that number before even fifty years had passed. In 1893 a superintendent wrote of the wretched conditions for those incarcerated there at the time--all 1,900 of them. Bad though this is (overcrowding is a serious problem too often ignored or dismissed), it was nothing compared to what was to come. At its peak in 1955, the prison complex held 5,235 inmates--well over triple capacity and approaching quadruple.
