Per Wikipedia: "Silverton is a former silver mining camp, most or all of which is now included in a federally designated National Historic Landmark District, the Silverton Historic District. The town population was 531 at U.S. Census 2000. Silverton is linked to Durango by the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, a National Historic Landmark. Silverton no longer has active mining, but subsists by tourism, maintenance of US 550 (which links Montrose with Durango via Silverton), mine pollution remediation, and retirees. In 2002 an extreme ski mountain, Silverton Mountain, opened near the town."
For the record, this is what happens when you don't buy a chair from them:
Just kidding...but they do allow you to take pictures of the jail (though they ask for a small donation to do so)..you can also put people in the jail and take pictures of them like we did here, but there is a warning sign that says "do not close the door fully." Methinks there's probably a good reason for that.
Even back then there were tomfoolery artists and pranksters, purveyors of shenanigans and hijinks...or maybe they were just normal teenagers.
From what we learned, there were a lot of males (since that's who did the mining, and there was lots of mining), and women were in short supply. So, this is what happens when you have nothing better to do I guess? Also note the amount they're willing to pay. I assume that was a lot back then. Hell, it's a decent amount today...it could feed me for a week.
This is the Silverton Court House present day 2016. Nothing too special about it really, which is why this is the only picture I have of it and I never bothered to go inside.
 |
| Locals planning their extracurricular sewing activities. Meh. |
Ok, back to the fun stuff. So eventually, the little mining town full of pipe-freezing pranksters eventually did what small mining towns did back then: it grew into a larger mining town and the low-level pranksters were replaced (or maybe even murdered) by more serious criminals (or possibly murdered by vigilantes/townspeople). In any case, the mayor and the sheriff or whoever decided that the crime had become too much and it was high time to get a proper jail, hence this picture:
Keep in mind, what you see here was as hi-tech as it got back then. There were multiple cells within the larger cell block, and each one could be opened independently of the others from the outside utilizing some levers & gears. It was actually a hell of an engineering marvel in my opinion; sheer mechanical wizardry. These guys didn't have AutoCAD or CNC machines, they just had their brains and rudimentary tools to draw blueprints and build the stuff by hand. This toilet is in the main room and it is surrounded by individual cells to the left and right. So if a prisoner needed to relieve himself, the guard would work some levers on the outside in order to open that single prisoner's cell door to allow access to the toilet, which as you can see had running water and was still in a secure space inside the block. There was also a bath in its own area which was accessed similarly. Each cell could hold around 4 people, and there were hammocks instead of bunks or cots for sleeping/reading/giving yourself tattoos/writing revolutionary political manifestos.
 |
| "That's bull****. We NEVER got a hammock in the Mexico City jail." |
