Lorton Reformatory, DC's Prison Farm
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Virginia
The District of Columbia bought the land for the Occoquan Workhouse here in nineteen ten and opened it in nineteen sixteen, part of a progressive era vision: rehabilitate inmates through agricultural labor and social interaction rather than punishment alone. Offenders serving short sentences farmed the land and worked in factory production on the grounds. The design reflected genuine reformist ideals.
In nineteen seventeen, those ideals collided with political reality. Dozens of women suffragists, arrested for picketing the White House, were sent to Occoquan. Guards beat several of them in what became known as the Night of Terror. The incident inflamed national outrage and accelerated the push for the Nineteenth Amendment. The facility later expanded to a walled penitentiary, was renamed Lorton Reformatory, and by the nineteen fifties was badly overcrowded. It closed in two thousand one after about eighty-five years of operation. The grounds have since been redeveloped into an arts district and residential neighborhood.
