Kitchen and Center Stairway
courtesy: David Weiss
This room, directly behind the Commissioners' Meeting room, was the kitchen. This room was once more complex, but walls have been taken out and other configurations have been made since renovations to serve as the Clerk's (Stephanie Miller) office space.
When the sheriff or another person prepared meals for prisoners, he would place them on a sliding table with rollers on it. This table, then, would slide into the cell block area. There were two pieces of 5-inch channel iron on the cell block side of the tray, and a lock on the tray inside the kitchen. Machinery, then, was used to open all cell doors so that prisoners could go into the corridor to eat.
This magnificent staircase is original! (This is what it looks like today) At the base of the stairs is a beautiful knob, parially cut off in the picture here. It is said that many buildings this age used to have secret compartments within the base of their staircase that preserved the blueprints of the building. It is not known whether this is the case for the Old Jail Building. At the top of the stairs a new banister was added for visitor safety. It is this area (at the top) in which prisoners were fingerprinted and "introduced" to their new living quarters.
photo by Anna Patton
