Allen County Jail: Two-Foot Stone Walls Since 1869

The Old Allen County Jail in Iola is a two-story limestone building that has stood on the same corner since eighteen sixty-nine. Voters approved ten thousand dollars in bonds in August eighteen sixty-eight, and the building was completed the following year by the firm of White and Hays for a contract price of eight thousand four hundred dollars with walls two feet thick, designed to hold whoever needed holding on the Kansas frontier. The lower floor originally contained wooden cells; a state-of-the-art steel cell cage was installed in eighteen ninety-one.

The jail operated continuously for nearly ninety years, from its first prisoner in early eighteen seventy through its closure in nineteen fifty-eight. In nineteen sixty-two the Allen County Historical Society converted it into a museum. It remains one of the best-preserved examples of nineteenth-century Kansas frontier justice infrastructure, a building where the limestone walls are older than most of the towns along this stretch of Route Fifty-Four.