Original Culberson County Jail

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, Culberson County didn't come into being out of thin air. The marker is plain about what brought things to a head: Mexican bandit attacks along that stretch of West Texas.

In the wake of those raids, the county was organized in 1911, because somebody had to keep order out there, and that somebody needed a badge and four walls to put troublemakers behind. The very next year, 1912, the county commissioners sat down, looked at some plans, and said yes. Yes to a red brick jail.

Solid, serious, the kind of structure that says we mean business. And red brick, mind you, is not nothing. That's a statement.

That's a county telling the world it intends to stick around. Now here's where the story gets interesting, and maybe a little humbling for whoever laid those bricks. Prisoners (and apparently more than once, the marker says at times) dug right through those walls.

Through the brick. You build yourself a fortress and the guests start renovating. Whether they got far is a question the marker leaves open, but the audacity of it hangs in the air like West Texas dust.

And yet, that jail stood. It kept on standing and kept on serving, through the digs and the escapes and the decades, all the way until 1964, when a new courthouse was completed; one that came with its own jail built right in. Only then did the old red brick building finally get to retire.

Something to think about next time you pass through Culberson County: that stubborn little jailhouse outlasted the outlaws, outlasted the attempts to crumble it from the inside, and only yielded when something better came along. That's not a bad run for a pile of red brick.

What the marker says

In order to provide local law enforcement in the wake of Mexican bandit attacks, Culberson County was organized in 1911. The following year the county commissioners accepted plans for construction of this red brick jail. Although prisoners at times dug through the brick walls, the structure was used until a new courthouse which included a jail was completed in 1964.