Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Dorson and going through the Territorial Prison.

I was quite surprised as to the amount of preservation and reconstruction that has been done since the prison has had many year of neglect and vandalism.

In the museum there were many padlocks which were used and as far as handcuffs, a nice set of three link Marlin Bottlenecks, a set of Tower Legirons marked Y CO (Yuma County)and several older Indian Darby legirons (the ones well made of good steel years ago) and one ball and chain with a small padlock on the end of the chain.

Here are some pictures of the cells and the ball. I recommend the book by John Mason Jeffrey "Adobe and Iron" for a good commentary on the history of the area and the construction of the Prison.

Ron

Here are pictures of the cuffs, Ron if you have better ones, please upload. Should we upload the reproduction junk?

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Dorson and going through the Territorial Prison.

I was quite surprised as to the amount of preservation and reconstruction that has been done since the prison has had many year of neglect and vandalism.

In the museum there were many padlocks which were used and as far as handcuffs, a nice set of three link Marlin Bottlenecks, a set of Tower Legirons marked Y CO (Yuma County)and several older Indian Darby legirons (the ones well made of good steel years ago) and one ball and chain with a small padlock on the end of the chain.

Here are some pictures of the cells and the ball. I recommend the book by John Mason Jeffrey "Adobe and Iron" for a good commentary on the history of the area and the construction of the Prison.

Ron

Click to expand...

As you can see from Ron's pictures above, this was well thought out in construction to prevent escape. The metal work is all wrought iron construction which is why it has lasted so long. There were 2 basic cell door designs, single door and double door. The doors don't swing outward but swing inward. In the first picture shows a double door design and the doors are linked together by pivoting rods top and bottom. Might be a bit hard but the 2 red arrows show the rods. The third red arrow is point to a tab in the frame that secures the door and will show the details in other pictures.





Notice how the part of the door that closes over the tabs and gets padlocked to the staple in the wall.



In the single door, you might have a chance if you can get to the padlock but that is going to be a real reach to get too. Even more so with the double doors for the higher security. In it's history, they never had an escape from the cells. Escapes were from work details and outside the cell area.

Here is a better view of the connecting bar which compliments the first photo.

This bar allows both doors to close simultaneously when locking the outside door.


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