The Missouri State Penitentiary, The Bloodiest Forty-Seven Acres in America

The Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City opened in eighteen thirty-six and did not close until two thousand four. In the one hundred sixty-eight years between those dates it held hundreds of thousands of prisoners, endured riots that left people dead, housed one of the most overcrowded and violent prison environments in the country, and was called by Time magazine in nineteen sixty-seven the bloodiest forty-seven acres in America. The oldest surviving cell block, built in the eighteen-thirties from local limestone quarried largely by the prisoners who would occupy it, still stands.

The walls are thick and the corridors are narrow and the light that comes through the barred windows falls in bars onto the stone floor the same way it has for nearly two centuries. The physical fabric of the place is its history. The penitentiary held James Earl Ray, who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.

in April of nineteen sixty-eight. Ray had escaped from the prison in April of nineteen sixty-seven, hidden inside a bread box loaded onto a delivery truck. He was recaptured in London in June of nineteen sixty-eight, two months after the assassination.

The escape route was an ordinary service exit. The prison's ability to hold him had simply, on one occasion, failed. Jesse James was never imprisoned at the Missouri State Penitentiary, but the connection to James is common enough in Missouri lore that it is worth naming directly.

His brother Frank James surrendered that same year, but he was held in other county jails while awaiting trial, was acquitted, and never served time at the penitentiary. The prison's history of violence extends to multiple riots. The worst in the modern era occurred on September twenty-second, nineteen fifty-four, when a single night of unrest resulted in four deaths and extensive property destruction.

Overcrowding was the primary cause. The prison was designed for a fraction of the population it was holding. After closing in two thousand four the penitentiary became a heritage site offering tours.

Its reputation ensures it draws visitors who come to understand what it held rather than what it celebrated.