Territorial Jail Has Local Tourism All Locked Up
Photography: Courtesy of Park City Historical Society
To the staff at the Park City Museum, it’s a familiar scenario: People walk through the front door, blow past the elaborate exhibits on the main floor and head straight for the basement.
It reminds you of the kid who gets a big expensive toy for Christmas and spends the next hour playing in the box.
What draws people to this gloomy subterranean space is not what it contains — which isn’t much — but what it represents. For more than half a century, its masonry walls echoed with the curses of the inebriated, stifled the protests of union radicals and, on occasion, protected accused murderers from mobs intent on dispensing their own form of frontier justice.
Its proper name is the Park City Territorial Jail, but for at least 100 years, it has been known locally as “the dungeon.” And for good reason. Equipped with only the bare essentials, this stark stronghold is a chilling reminder of the primitive state of “corrections” at the turn of the 20th century.
Local historian Gary Kimball has identified 11 men who died here between 1891 and 1916. Among them was Joseph Falcon, a “habitual drunkard,” according to The Park Record, who, in April 1911, apparently took the wrong side of an animated discussion about unionism with Martin McGuinn in the M. and M. Saloon. McGuinn ended up “knocking him down, kicking him and giving him such a beating that was brutal and murderous to say the least,” the paper said.
Ironically, while police persuaded Falcon to sleep it off at the city jail, they didn’t arrest his attacker until after Falcon was found dead in his cell at 3 o’clock the following morning.
Built in 1885 as part of the original City Hall at 528 Main Street, the jail consists of three individual cells, each just large enough for an iron bed. There’s also a large holding cell and an open area that holds a single wood stove and a rudimentary toilet. The floor is concrete. The walls are stone with a veneer of plaster. Each cell door is a lattice of heavy iron slats.
“On the ground floor is the Marshal’s office and fireman’s hall,” The Park Record reported in January 1886. “Downstairs are the apartments designed to protect the drunkard from the wintry blasts and the evil doer from all harm after he has once been landed within its walls.” Iron doors, built by the Berry Brothers blacksmith shop, were installed the following September. The building was gutted in the fire that wiped out the Park City business district in June 1898, but was rebuilt shortly afterwards.
Although most of the graffiti on the walls of the jail is recent, one enduring artifact is a crude replica of the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”) insignia, apparently created by a union activist in 1916. A radical element in the labor movement, the Wobblies were not well received in Park City, even by the local miners’ union. “Flag-hating anarchists,” Park Record editor Sam Raddon once called them.
In spite of its appearance, the jail was no Alcatraz. Over the years, prisoners found many ways to slip out. The premier escape artist was probably Jerry Murphy, whose frequent arrests for drunkenness gave him plenty of opportunities. Murphy’s modus operandi remained a mystery until tracks in the snow finally gave him away after his fourth escape in January 1905. “He had pried a plank from the jail wood shed and was crawling up and out through that,” The Park Record revealed. “When he had made his way out, he would replace the plank and nothing further would be heard of him until he was taken in again for drunkenness.”
Getting drunk in Park City wasn’t difficult, even during Prohibition. But staying drunk — while in jail — required a little ingenuity. It typically involved the complicity of someone on the outside such as local bootlegger Mike Spanos.
“One of the cells had a window, since bricked in, with heavy steel strapping in a gridiron pattern so tight that it was nearly impossible to pass anything to the prisoners within,” wrote historian Gary Kimball, who grew up in Park City. “Yet Mike managed to keep his friends drunk for their entire stay. He took a roll of wax paper, spiraled it out into a long funnel, and poured his illicit booze to the waiting tin cups below.”
Like Falcon and Murphy, most prisoners committed crimes no worse than drinking too much or peddling illicit booze. But, on occasion, the jail housed some very unsavory characters. Among them were at least a dozen accused killers including:
Neal Mulloy, who gunned down G.J. Hughes outside Cupit & Brennan’s saloon in August 1887.
William “Tex” Collier, who beat Jay C. Watson to death with a pool cue in the “400” saloon in December 1894.
Frank James (no relation to Jesse), who shot John Fitzgerald in the back after an argument on upper Main Street in August 1901.
Pedro Cano, whose murder of a local prostitute in March 1923 was described in lurid detail in The Park Record. After Cano’s arrest, the paper said, a crowd of about 150 people gathered outside the jail. “A rope was exhibited and undoubtedly had it not been for the good judgment and coolheadedness of Sheriff Joe Clark … and others, Park City would likely have been disgraced by unlawful mob violence.”
Typically, these criminals were quickly moved elsewhere for trial. Cano, for example, was tried and convicted by a jury in Coalville and executed by firing squad at the state penitentiary in Salt Lake City.
In May 1901, the jail housed a pair of crooks whose exploits had titillated a town already jaded by stories of murder and other mayhem. It was, The Park Record said with a little hyperbole, “the greatest sensation that was ever sprung on the citizens of Park City.” George Redsull and Albert Niles had been arrested for stealing more than half a ton of silver from the Marsac refinery.
But this was no Bonnie-and-Clyde in-your-face robbery. It turned out that Redsull, the Marsac night watchman, had, over about 15 months, quietly been smuggling bullion out of the refinery in his lunch bucket and stashing it at his house and the house of his son-in-law, Albert Niles.
By the 1940s, with more modern jails being built elsewhere, the Park City jail had become an artifact. If police needed to keep prisoners overnight, they would use small holding cells on the upper floors of the building. According to a 1959 story in The Park Record, the dungeon was by then becoming a popular tourist attraction.
“All the old leg irons and ball-and-chains were down there, and over the years people … would steal ’em,” recalls Arnold Kay MacNaughtan, who joined the two-man Park City Police Department in 1957. “When I left (in 1965), I think there was one ball-and-chain left hanging on the wall.”
The last documented occupants of the dungeon were Neil J. Brown and Claude Hurley who, in February 1966, were locked up there as a last resort after twice escaping from the upstairs holding cells.
When the city moved its offices to the Marsac Building in 1983, the old City Hall was restored and designated as the new home of the local history museum. But while some museums have to work to recreate that sense of history, the Park City Museum already had one leg up. Or should that be one leg iron up?
As a museum volunteer for almost two decades, David Hampshire gave many visitors directions to the Territorial Jail.
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