The Castle on the Cumberland

Rising from the bluffs above the Cumberland River at Eddyville, Kentucky, the Kentucky State Penitentiary looks less like a prison than a medieval fortress. Italian stonemasons quarried the limestone from the riverbed below and laid it into towers, battlements, and thick curtain walls that earn the place its nickname: the Castle on the Cumberland. The Kentucky Legislature authorized the branch penitentiary in eighteen eighty-four. The moving force behind putting it here was Hylan Benton Lyon, a former Confederate general and Eddyville native who saw the project as economic development for his home county. Construction began the same year, using convict labor alongside the Italian craftsmen, and the prison opened on Christmas Eve, eighteen ninety.

For most of its early decades, the Castle was Kentucky's second state prison, handling overflow from the main facility in Frankfort. In nineteen ten, the state switched its execution method from hanging to electrocution and designated Eddyville as the sole site for all state executions. An electric chair called Old Sparky was installed in nineteen eleven. The first man executed in it was Charles Howard of Franklin County, thirty years old. Over the following decades, nearly two hundred men would die in that chair. On July thirteenth, nineteen twenty-eight, the state executed seven men in a single day, a record for judicially authorized executions in American history.

Kentucky abandoned the electric chair in favor of lethal injection in the nineteen nineties, but the Castle on the Cumberland remains the state's only maximum security prison and the home of its death row. The walls the Italian stonemasons laid more than a century ago still stand. The Cumberland River has since been dammed into Lake Barkley, so the fortress now sits above a reservoir rather than a free-flowing river. Eddyville itself was partly relocated when the dam was built. The prison stayed.