The Penitentiary on the Bluff: Prisoners Who Built Their Own Walls
Near Sioux Falls, South Dakota
In eighteen eighty-one, Congress appropriated money for a federal prison in Sioux Falls, and Richard Pettigrew, characteristically, was the man who lobbied for it to be here. The territory needed the federal investment; Sioux Falls needed the institution. Architect Wallace L. Dow designed the structure, and construction began in eighteen eighty-two. By that November, the first wing was complete.
When South Dakota became a state in eighteen eighty-nine, the territorial prison became the South Dakota State Penitentiary. It has been in continuous operation since, making it among the oldest functioning correctional institutions in the state, over a century and a half of custody on the same parcel of ground.
What makes the construction history unusual is the source of the labor. Armed guards marched gangs of prisoners down the north bluff to the quartzite outcroppings along the Big Sioux River. The prisoners cut and dressed the stone, loaded it onto horse-drawn wagons, and hauled it up the bluff to the construction site. They were building the walls that would hold them. In the eighteen nineties, a new enclosure wall was added using the same method: prisoners quarrying the stone that expanded the perimeter of their own confinement.
The penitentiary compound covers about thirty acres in northern Sioux Falls. Much of the original quartzite construction remains, though additions and modifications have been made across the generations. From a distance, particularly from the river, the pink stone walls have a solidity that looks almost geological, as if the prison grew from the bluff rather than being built on it.
The institution has housed some notable inmates over the years and has been the site of periodic reforms and recurring debates about conditions and capacity. The debates continue. The quartzite walls, meanwhile, are not going anywhere.
