The Reformatory: Colorado's Second Oldest Prison
Near Buena Vista, Colorado
On the north edge of Buena Vista sits one of the oldest operating prisons in Colorado. The Colorado State Reformatory opened here in eighteen ninety two, second in age only to the territorial prison down in Canon City. It was built as a reformatory in the original sense, a place for boys and young men convicted of lesser crimes, meant to reform rather than simply punish.
The location made a certain sense. Buena Vista had three railroads by the late eighteen eighties, an established supply town, and flat valley bottomland where inmates could run a self sustaining farm, cutting hay and working dairies in the shadow of the Collegiate Peaks. The institution's history was not gentle.
Its first riot came in eighteen ninety five, only three years after opening. In nineteen seventy eight the state converted it to an adult medium custody prison, the Buena Vista Correctional Facility, and a military style boot camp program was added in nineteen ninety one. Today the complex holds over twelve hundred inmates and remains one of the largest employers in Chaffee County, a fact of economic life here for more than one hundred thirty years.
The prison threads through town history in quieter ways too. Inmate crews built the local dog park. And in the town cemetery, Mount Olivet, a section called Block Twenty Two holds the unclaimed dead of the reformatory under rows of nameless wooden crosses, men who served their time in this valley and never left it.
