DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the marker at the Armstrong County Jail tells it — and I'm stickin' to what the stone says. Now, before there was a proper jail in Armstrong County, there was what folks charitably called a calaboose. A frame calaboose.
Primitive, by any fair measure. The kind of arrangement that probably kept honest men honest and nobody else. Something had to be done.
So in 1894, Armstrong County built itself a real jail. And when they decided to build it, they didn't do it halfway. They quarried stone fourteen miles south, down at Dripping Springs in Palo Duro Canyon, and then — here's where it gets good — local citizens loaded that stone into wagons and hauled it all the way up here themselves.
Every last block of it. Brought it to this very site, where it was cut and laid into something that meant business. What they raised up was two stories tall, topped by a dome, with walls running a full twenty inches thick.
Twenty inches. That is not a suggestion that you stay inside. That is a statement.
And the county's neighbors apparently noticed. Because that building got a reputation — the kind that travels. Dangerous convicts from other counties were kept here.
When your local facility couldn't hold a man, you sent him to Armstrong County. Now, old-timers will tell you — and this is the part worth leanin' in for — only three prisoners ever escaped. Ever.
Out of that stone dome with those twenty-inch walls. Three. The marker doesn't say who they were.
Doesn't say how they managed it. Just leaves you sitting with that number like a campfire that's down to its last coals. The building you see today went up in 1953 — and here's the thread that ties it all together — it was constructed using the stone from that original 1894 jail.
The same rock that came out of Palo Duro Canyon. The same rock local citizens hauled in wagons. It just took a different shape.
Some stones, it turns out, have more than one story to tell.
What the marker says
Erected in 1953, this building is constructed of stone used to build the first masonry jail in Armstrong County, 1894. Stone for the structure (which replaced a primitive, frame "calaboose") was quarried 14 miles south at Dripping Springs in Palo Duro Canyon and then hauled here in wagons driven by local citizens. The rock was cut at this site. The 1894 building had two stories, topped by a dome, and 20-inch walls. So sturdy was it that dangerous convicts from other counties were kept here. Old-timers remember that only three prisoners ever escaped. (1969)