Ron Brown - Behind Bars: Inside Ontarios Heritage Gaols

BEHIND BARS

Inside Ontarios Heritage Gaols

RON BROWN

N ATURAL H ERITAGE B OOKS
T ORONTO

Copyright 2006 by Ron Brown

All rights reserved. No portion of this book, with the exception of brief extracts for
the purpose of literary or scholarly review, may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of the publisher.

Published by Natural Heritage / Natural History Inc.
PO Box 95, Station O, Toronto, Ontario M4A 2M8
www.naturalheritagebooks.com

All visuals courtesy of the author, unless otherwise credited.
Front cover, from top left: carving of felons head (Woodstock jail);
Coby jail in Coboconk; Wardens house, Kingston Penitentiary;
Waterloo County jail in Kitchener; cells in Carleton County jail (Ottawa);
the restored lock-up in Beaverton; Governors house in Cayuga.
Back cover, top, part of the original yard wall at the Wellington County
jail (Guelph); bottom left, the jail at LOrignal; bottom right, a former
jail cell converted into a guest room in Cobourg.

Cover design by Neil Thorne
Book design by Norton Hamill Design
Edited by Jane Gibson

Printed and bound in Canada by Hignell Book Printing

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Brown, Ron, 1945
Behind bars : inside Ontarios heritage gaols / Ron Brown.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-897045-17-4
1. JailsOntarioHistory. 2. OntarioHistory, Local. I. Title.
HV8746.C32B76 2006 365.9713 C2006-904171-7

Natural Heritage / Natural History Inc. acknowledges the financial support
of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our
publishing program. We acknowledge the support of the Government of Ontario
through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative.
We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through
the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and
the Association for the Export of Canadian Books.

I want to dedicate this book to my family for enduring my absences
while researching Ontarios heritage jails, although they may have,
on occasion, wished that my time behind bars was a little longer.
Nor should we forget those who have, for various reasons,
spent time unjustly in the dark confines of our jails.

I am happy to give considerable credit to those who tend what I consider the researchers most useful source of information, the local library. Here are files filled with anecdotes, newspaper clippings and unpublished accounts, which contain many of the more colourful stories about their communitys local history. I wish to thank the curators of the museums in Gore Bay, Beaverton, Napanee, Tweed and Cayuga for their particular help, as well municipal staff in Brockville, Cornwall, LOrignal and Guelph, and a thank you to Chris Raible of Creemore for background on the Windsor Raids of 1838. My gratitude goes, too, to the cops, the cons and the retired corrections officers who provided me with their candid insights into Ontarios heritage gaols. Lastly, I want to thank my daughter, Jeri, for her valuable work as my research assistant for this project.

Go to a jail in Ontario today, and you are likely to leave as easily as you entered, voluntarily and with a smile. The reason is simplemost of the early lock-ups in this province are no longer used for incarceration. Rather, where there were cells that once held hardened thieves, hookers, or just the itinerant or the insane, there are now books, or filing cabinets, or desks, orcells.

While most have been renovated into town halls, law offices, libraries or government departments, leaving the facades alone as the sole legacy of their distinctive heritage, others, such as those at Goderich and Gore Bay are preserved entirely as jail museums, while those at London, Brampton, Ottawa and Cobourg, have retained portions of their old jail features. The little lock-ups at Beaverton, Creemore, Manitowaning and Woodslee have also been preserved as jailhouse museums, while at Coboconk and Port Dalhousie, a gift shop and bar, respectively, now occupy the cell areas. Sadly, recent and ill-considered demolitions of the county jails in St. Thomas, Kingston, Hamilton, and especially that in St. Catharines, have robbed modern-day residents in those communities of a part of their legacy, even though it may be a dark legacy and one that some would just as soon overlook.

The reader may wonder what criteria the author has chosen to define a heritage jail. Quite simply, a heritage jail for this book is one that was built prior to the era of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), and one that is visually distinct from related buildings such as town halls and courthouses. With the inauguration of the new province-wide police force on October 13, 1909, modern lock-ups began to be included as detention cells within police stations. These represent an era of centralization, modernization and the needs of the auto age, while the dismal dungeons of the past reflect an Ontario whose like will never be seen again.

As with most of the books that this author has written, the aim is to encourage readers to explore and celebrate the legacy of a bygone era in Ontario. But unlike the criminal, the vagrant, or the insane, who once lurked within those dank confines of Ontarios heritage gaols, readers can leave as easily as they enter.

BEHIND BARS

The prison [at Alba Fucens in central Italy] is a deep underground dungeon, dark and noisesomewith so many shut up in such close quarters, the poor wretches were reduced to the appearance of brutes. And since the food and everything pertaining to their other needs were so foully commingled, a stench so terrible assailed anyone who drew near it that it could scarcely be endured. Such is the disturbing scene depicted by the 1st century AD scribe named Diodorus Siculus.

Another early depiction of ancient prisons comes from historian Sallust who described the 2nd century AD prison in the Roman forum as a place about 12 feet below the surface of the ground. It is enclosed on all side by wallsNeglect, darkness and stench make it hideous, and fearsome to behold. The need to restrain misfits, and to punish evil-doers is as old as human society itself. With the evolution of cities and the political institutions to govern them, rules were written and dungeons constructed to formalize the reasons and the places for such incarcerations.

In England, the evolution of the jail system began following the conquest of England in 1066 by William of Normandy, who built the first Tower of London. A century later, Henry II ordered his sheriffs to build jails in each county. During this period, however, except for the notorious Tower, prisons were used to house misfits and not to punish crimes. Actual punishment usually consisted of mutilation, humiliation, exile or execution. Many an early prison became infamous over the centuries. Besides the Tower of London, a popular London attraction to this day, there was the Doges prison in Venice. Although one of the citys most beautiful buildings on the outside, it was a brutish dungeon on the inside where anyone could end up based solely on an anonymous letter; no proof needed.