Convicts
Before a central
state penitentiary was established in Texas,
local jails housed convicted felons. The Congress
of the Republic of Texas defeated bills for a
penal institution in both 1840 and 1842; in May
1846 the First Legislature of the new state
passed a penitentiary act, but the Mexican War
prevented implementation of the law. On March 13,
1848, the legislature passed the act that began
the Texas penitentiary. On October 1, 1849, the
first prisoner, a convicted horse thief from
Fayette County, entered the partially completed
Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. The
facility held only three prisoners in 1849, but
by 1855 it housed seventy-five convicts, and by
1860, 182.
In 1852 the state
established the office of financial agent, a
position first held by John S. Besser. Texas
initially supervised its prisoners under the
Auburn System, developed by penologists at the
state penitentiary in Auburn, New York. In Auburn
penology, prisoners housed behind enclosed walls
engaged in day labor and retired in silence to
their cells during the evening hours. By 1856 the
state had built a cotton and wool mill at
Huntsville in order to make the penitentiary
self-sustaining. The mill, which could process
500 bales of cotton and 6,000 pounds of wool
annually, provided money to the state. During the
Civil War the penitentiary sold more than two
million yards of cotton and nearly 300,000 yards
of wool to both civilians and the government of
the Confederate States of America. Wartime
production made a profit of $800,000. The end of
the war and reduced demand for cotton and wool
products, however, resulted in financial
difficulties as the prison population began to
grow.
The number of
convicts increased from 146 to 264 between the
end of the Civil War and the fall of 1866. In
February 1867 the board leased
100 prisoners to the Airliner Railroad and 150 to
the Brazos Branch Railroad. For most of the next
forty-five years the state contracted large
numbers of Texas prisoners to private employers. L.
A. Ellis of Marion County leased the Huntsville
Penitentiary from January 1878 through March
1883.
Below are census
records for 1880, the time period in which L.A.
Ellis leased the prisoners. They were housed in a
prison camp in Kellyville, Marion County, Texas.
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