Fire in the Big House. Mitchel P. Roth
Vest, a Columbus police officer, was asked several days after having visited the fairgrounds whether he had seen anything unusual. He reported that his attention was called to “a knife, [a] dagger about two and a half inches long, that was cut to a knife edge and come to a point, very sharp, and had a wooden handle on it wrapped.” He said it had been taken off one of the victims. He was alerted by workers to other items of interest, with one telling him, “We have a lot of other stuff over here we have taken.” Vest was then shown a box, two feet long and eighteen inches wide, a .32 automatic Colt inside of it. He was informed that “it come off of the prisoners…. We taken that off of a man that we taken [sic] $140 in money off of.” Other items that could have been put to deadly use included files and saws. One of the fire investigation inquisitors, Director of Public Welfare Hal H. Griswold, shrewdly observed, “They all have knives in there now, don’t they?” Vest said, “I don’t know anything about it,” which was probably true since he worked outside the prison as a police officer. Griswold flippantly responded, “If they don’t have them it is probably the only institution in Ohio where those things are not manufactured.”61
On April 22, as the bodies were being prepared at the fairgrounds for burial, Governor Myles Cooper, who had arrived early the morning after the fire, was convening a Board of Inquiry (BOI) to look into the causes of the fire. The outset of the investigation was marked by conflict between the county and state authorities over whether to suspend Warden Thomas. The issue was settled quickly when Governor Cooper took the case out of the hands of the local prosecutor and assigned the attorney general to take over the official inquiry. The hearings began in the prison records office, which had been converted into a temporary courtroom.
3
COLUMBUS, OHIO
Here were all ranks and ages, from the man of high life to the meanest pickpocket, from the gray-haired man of 80 down to the boy of 14.
—James Finley, 1850
The Ohio Penitentiary was “most unsuitably situated in the midst of the city of Columbus, a few blocks from the main street.”
—Handbook of American Prisons and Reformatories (1933)
Anyone approaching the Ohio Penitentiary (also known as the Ohio State Penitentiary) in Columbus from “a distance” and a “southern standpoint” at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly those who were “unacquainted with the character of the vast edifice that looms up against the sky, might envy the residents of a structure of such palatial dimensions.” But as one approached closer to the prison structure, its details came more into focus—“the massive walls, armed sentries, battlemented gables, grated windows and towering turrets, resembling the feudal castles of romance and barbarism.” Getting even closer to the looming structure, “the real character and purpose of the institution would be apparent to any intelligent mind; and perhaps would fill the place of [misplaced] envy for its unfortunate inmates.”1
Columbus, like a handful of other American cities—Huntsville, Texas, Clinton and Ossining, New York, and others—became synonymous with its famous prison, contrary to the expectations of the local chamber of commerce. The Ohio Penitentiary maintained a commanding presence on West Spring Street from 1834 to 1998, and even before that building was constructed, being “sent to Columbus” meant hard time for Ohio convicts. The prison became “a local landmark as easily identifiable with Ohio’s capital city as the statehouse.”2
As it stood in 1930, the Ohio Penitentiary was just the most recent version of a series of carceral structures purpose-built to handle an expanding clientele as Columbus grew throughout the nineteenth century. Formerly part of the Northwest Territory, Ohio joined the union as the seventeenth state in 1803. As a state, it adopted a number of law codes from surrounding states. The following decade was one of progress and development, in no small part due to the rapid influx of settlers and the removal of the Indian threat after the War of 1812. But it took almost a decade for the government to consider providing a facility specifically dedicated to the incarceration and punishment of malefactors. The first stride toward providing a prison for the new state took place in December 1811, when the legislature accepted a donation of two ten-acre plots of land, agreeing to the donor’s requirement that one plot would be used for a state house and the other for a state penitentiary. The offer also hinged on establishing the permanent seat of government on the donor’s land, located on the east bank of the Scioto River. After these proposals were accepted, the following February, “in accordance with them, a town which was destined to become the city of Columbus was surveyed,” with a patch of land set apart for the state prison.3
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