Many Auburn people are quick to say you can’t talk about their city without talking about Auburn Correctional Facility. After all, the maximum-security prison, which opened in 1817, employs about 850 workers and is the oldest continually operating prison in the United States. Confined there are some 1,800 inmates, who make all of the state’s license plates. “Auburn is...
Cayuga Museum Director Eileen McHugh has written a book on the history of the Auburn Correctional Facility. The museum has an exhibit about the prison with historical photos and some artifacts. During a tour of the museum, McHugh shows fifth-graders from Stonehedge Elementary School, in Camillus, photos of the electric chair.
The world's first electric chair, in which William Kemmler was executed on August 6, 1890 at Auburn Correctional Facility.Many Auburn people are quick to say you can’t talk about their city without talking about Auburn Correctional Facility.
After all, the maximum-security prison, which opened in 1817, employs about 850 workers and is the oldest continually operating prison in the United States. Confined there are some 1,800 inmates, who make all of the state’s license plates.
“Auburn is the prison, and the prison is Auburn,” said Dick Rourke, who retired as a correction officer captain there after 33 years. His father and grandfather worked there as guards, too, racking up more than 50 years between them.
Rourke helped Eileen McHugh put together a pictorial history of the prison, which dominates the city’s historical roots and its downtown landscape. Titled “Auburn Correctional Facility,” the book features more than 200 photos that illuminate the prison’s past and its contributions to this country’s penal system.
Arcadia Publishing Co. published the book as part of its “Images of America” series of regional, pictorial history books.
Book signings
Eileen McHugh will sign copies of her book “Auburn Correctional Facility” at 7 p.m. Thursday at Creekside Books and Coffee, 35 Fennell St., Skaneateles, and at 7 p.m., June 22 at Seymour Library, 176 Genesee St., Auburn.
McHugh, executive director of the Cayuga Museum of History & Art, drew mostly from the museum’s collection of prison photographs to compile the book. Those photos were part of a huge 2003 exhibit, and some of those images now comprise a smaller year-round display at the 203 Genesee St. museum.
“These are very rare photographs, and now everyone can have them,” said McHugh, who is donating all book proceeds to the museum.
She said she enjoyed doing the book and has learned much since starting her research for the exhibit. She also gained a lot of respect for the prison guards.
“They spend their lives working with some really scary people,” said McHugh, who toured a cellblock a few years ago.
The front yard of of Auburn Correctional Facility, between the State Street wall and the front of the administration building, circa 1910.
She got plenty of help with the book from Rourke and Michael Pettigrass, a correction counselor who serves as unofficial historian for the 135 State St. prison. Pettigrass and Rourke contributed photos and proofread McHugh’s work before it was published.
“She did a great job touching on the prison’s major historical significance .¤.¤ . She was on the money on most of those things,” said Pettigrass, who wrote the book’s foreword.
Like Rourke, McHugh said the city and prison are linked in many ways. The photos illustrate some of those ties and spotlight items from the prison’s long list of firsts in the development of today’s correctional system.
Among those McHugh cited are the following: Auburn became the first prison to use the electric chair. William Kemler was put to death Aug. 6, 1890, for killing his lover with an ax in Buffalo. Auburn has executed 55 prisoners but stopped using the electric chair in 1916.
In 1821, Auburn was the first to house inmates in individual cells and stack the cells on top of each other.
In the 1820s, the prison initiated its brutal and widely copied method of prisoner control — called the “Auburn system” — in which inmates did hard labor during the day, were locked in solitary confinement at night and were flogged for even the smallest infractions. Many prisoners died from the whippings.
The prison hired the country’s first female matron to supervise its female inmates in 1832.
It was the first prison to start separating mentally ill prisoners from the general inmate population in 1859.
There are also photographs of the prison’s 1929 riots, which destroyed many of the prison buildings; pictures of the facility’s once elaborate and extensive gardens; and photos of some signature landmarks, such as the first electric chair and “Copper John” — the towering statue of a Revolutionary War soldier that stands atop the prison administration building.
“The Auburn prison really put the city on the national stage. It was the model for most prisons in the country. Much of this country’s penal system was founded in the Auburn prison,” McHugh said.
Contact Scott Rapp at srapp@syracuse.com or 289-4839.