DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Shackelford County's First Permanent Jail — and friend, this one's worth the stop. Now, when you're drivin' through Shackelford County, it's easy to pass a old limestone building without giving it a second thought. But this particular structure has got layers to it — like the stone itself — and every one of those layers has a story.
The jail went up in 1877 and 1878, built by a pair of architects and builders out of Fort Worth named Thomas and Woerner. They brought in ironwork from a man named Gerard B. Allen, all the way over in St.
Louis. So right from the start, this was no improvised frontier lockup. This was a serious piece of construction, limestone block by limestone block, assembled by masons who apparently did not fully trust the payment system — because if you look close at many of those native stone blocks, you'll find initials carved right into them.
The masons' own claims to payment, scratched into the rock. A little bit of insurance, you might say, chiseled in where nobody could argue with it. Now the building does its job for a while.
It holds prisoners. And one of those early prisoners is where this story takes a turn that'll make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. His name was John Selman.
An early prisoner in that very jail. You'd be forgiven for thinking that's where his story ended. It did not.
John Selman went on — and later, in El Paso, he killed one of the most notorious gunmen in Texas history: John Wesley Hardin. A man who walked into that limestone jail as a prisoner walked back out into a story that books are still being written about. Time moves on, the way it does.
By 1929, a new jail had superseded this one, and the old building found itself looking for a new purpose. It became a vault — and between 1940 and 1968, it held the archives of a playwright named Robert Nail. So the place that once held John Selman ended up as a keeper of words, of stories, of plays.
There's a kind of poetry in that that the old masons probably never scratched their initials over. Initials in limestone, ironwork from St. Louis, a prisoner who became a killer of legends, and a playwright's life's work stored in the silence.
That's Shackelford County's first permanent jail — and it earned every inch of its marker.
What the marker says
Erected 1877-78 by architects and builders Thomas & Woerner of Fort Worth. Gerard B. Allen of St. Louis furnished ironwork. Initials on many of the native limestone blocks show masons' claims to payment for work. An early prisoner, John Selman, later killed notorious gunman John Wesley Hardin in El Paso. Superseded 1929 by a new jail, this became vault for archives (1940-68) of playwright Robert Nail. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1962.