This digital story recording was created in conjunction with the Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street program and its Stories from Main Street student documentary initiative, called "Stories: Yes." The project encourages students and their mentors to research and record stories about small-towns and rural neighborhoods, waterways, personal memories, cultural traditions, work histories, as well as thoughts about American democracy. These documentaries are then shared on Smithsonian websites and social media.
Students at Trimble County High School in Bedford, Kentucky, worked with Trimble County Public Library to produce a series of videos detailing the history of the town, from the town's historic jail to sports teams and farming traditions.
Speaker 1 (00:03): Our small town provides safety and security. We know each other and the neighbors help keep an eye on things. On average Trimble County experiences a crime only once every 24 hours, but our stone jail has provided safety for our community until 1983. And today we'll hear some of those stories.
Hilda Parish (00:24): This part was built in, there's a controversy, 1855, 1859, and then there's other says built in 1850. The upstairs was built in 1899, but the lower part has six box and three cells. It has a stainless steel commode with a wash basin and it has a shower. They were put in in the fifties. Up until that time, it was pan of water and a rag.
Hilda Parish (01:05): But most of the prisoners that they had here at the time were just local peoples who were caught with alcohol, traffic tickets, citations and everything, held overnight. So they didn't bother about blocking any of the doors except for the door to the outside, not the inside doors. They left them open so that they could mingle. They sat and played cards and did their normal thing, probably shop guys and all that stuff.
Hilda Parish (01:36): But one incident, Henry Tingle was the jailer and he was bringing over a meal, opened the door, which there's two doors, so he was holding the tray. One of the prisoners decided he didn't want to stay. He crawled up in the ceiling and put his feet up on the door that was open. And when Henry came in, he jumped down on him, knocked him down and escaped for a couple of hours.
Hilda Parish (02:08): In 1927, James Riley Williams was a jailer and he had arrested a man and he had been in jail before and he said, "You're not going to put me back in jail. I won't go." And they had a scuffle. Riley Williams, the jailer, was killed and his wife, Pearl Williams, who was pregnant with the 10th child, became the jailer. And she even, they say, jailed the man who shot her husband. But she went on to be appointed the jailer to represent her husband until his term was up. She ran for office and was elected two more times.
Hilda Parish (03:00): Her own boys that were arrested for alcohol, they didn't like it here. They saw that there was a chip in the floor, which was just one thin layer of concrete. And one of them kept a spoon from his meal and every night they would chip away at that and hide the dirt underneath the bunk, the lower bunk way up front, where they couldn't be seen, dug a tunnel, went under this wall, dug under the ground and went under the yard fence and escaped. And there were three of them, but they did get caught. But can you imagine how long it took with a spoon to dig the tunnel to go under?
Hilda Parish (03:49): There was a teenager juvenile put upstairs because his parents couldn't handle him. And they thought a night in jail maybe or two would help straighten him out. It didn't, so he was brought back. He didn't like it. As close as these bars are, he squeezed between the bars in the upstairs part of this jail, shimmied down the side of the jail and escaped . . .
Asset ID: 2022.02.01
Find a complete transcript at: https://www.museumonmainstreet.org
