The Territorial Prison and the Younger Brothers
Near Stillwater, Minnesota
In a ravine north of downtown, in a hollow with a violent history, Minnesota built its first prison. The Minnesota Territorial Prison opened here in eighteen fifty three, in a spot already known as Battle Hollow after a deadly clash years earlier between Dakota and Ojibwe war parties. The prison became the state penitentiary, and its most famous inmates arrived after one of the most notorious crimes of the Old West.
On September seventh, eighteen seventy six, the James and Younger gang tried to rob the bank at Northfield, Minnesota. It went terribly wrong. Townspeople grabbed their guns and fought back, the cashier Joseph Heywood was shot dead for refusing to open the safe, and two of the outlaws were killed in the street.
Days later, three of the Younger brothers, Cole, Jim, and Bob, were run down and captured near Madelia. To escape the gallows they pleaded guilty and were sent here to Stillwater under life sentences. Bob Younger died of tuberculosis inside these walls in eighteen eighty nine.
Cole and Jim served nearly twenty five years before winning parole in nineteen oh one. The prison closed in nineteen fourteen and most of it was later torn down, but the warden's house on the bluff survives, keeping the story alive.
