The Squirrel Cage Jail
Near Omaha, Iowa
On Pearl Street in Council Bluffs sits one of the strangest jails ever built in America. Completed in eighteen eighty-five at a cost of thirty thousand dollars, the Pottawattamie County Jail was a rotary jail, meaning its cells sat on a massive iron carousel that a guard could spin by turning a hand crank. Only one cell door aligned with the single opening at any time, so one officer could manage the entire population without ever walking among the prisoners.
Eighteen such jails were built across the United States, but this three-story version is the only one of its height still standing, and one of just three survivors nationwide. Guards nicknamed it the Squirrel Cage. It held inmates until nineteen sixty-nine, and is now a museum on the National Register of Historic Places.
