Shafter mystery brings new info to light on ‘strap-iron’ jails
Shafter
After last week’s article questioning a possible jail site in the Shafter ghost town, an astute Shafter resident wrote to me reminding us that the county jail in Shafter could have been made of metal and might have been relocated.
As a reminder, Shafter is a ghost town, once a thriving community of thousands because of the adjacent silver mine. Now 25 people, including me, live there, surrounded by hundreds of abandoned and decaying adobe and rock houses and buildings.
The January 15 article noted that Shafter residents had long named a spot off the road behind the historic church as the jail site. All that remained for years were two crumbling adobe walls, but recent historic renovations of the town by the Tidewater Foundation revealed more walls, a floor and an entry way with steps. However, no physical or historical evidence (or photos) have surfaced to prove a jail existed there.
The Shafter reader pointed us to a TexasEscapes.com article on Candelaria—the tiny town west of Presidio on the Rio Grande—which shows a picture of a metal jail there taken by Barclay Gibson in 1968 with the caption: “Old Presidio County Jail in Candelaria. ‘It is the same one that now sits at the Presidio County Jail in Marfa.’” Candelaria is a small community on the Rio Grande, 48 miles northwest of Presidio.
However, the metal jail in Marfa adjacent to the county jail is not from Shafter, according to Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez, who noted that it is from Ruidosa, another tiny community on the highway to Candelaria. These are what are called strap-iron jails—open cages really—which were popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s to hold prisoners in remote areas before they could be transported elsewhere, or sometimes likely until they sobered up. (The cells in later years were made of hardened steel.)
I admit to never even seeing the one in Marfa. The sheriff was incredulous as to how I couldn’t. “It’s in front of the jail,” Dominguez told me. “If you walk up to it it will knock you in the head if you’re not looking. It’s right by the tree by the sully port.” I’ll blame the tree for blocking a clear view.
Dominguez said the Candelaria strap-iron is still there next to the old Howard Store—another one I missed, and I was just in Candelaria two weeks ago. The sheriff said Presidio also has a calaboose, just south of the Miguel Nieto’s Department Store. Yep, haven’t seen that one either. It’s on a small section of road named Jail Street. In a short article on the structure at tinytexasjails.com, William Moore outlines a conversation he had with Brad Newton, a former City of Presidio administrator, in which Newton talked about the structure’s history with Edmund Nieto who was 97 at the time. “Mr. Nieto stated that the jail was built in the late 1920s or early 1930s when he was a teenager,” Moore wrote. “He said that “As kids, we would watch for the lights to come on. We would go peek in to see who they had locked up.”
The strap-iron jails were sometimes put inside calabooses, simple one-room buildings used throughout Texas counties to detain prisoners, and thus, it is possible that a strap-iron was housed in the adobe structure ruins in Shafter today. I heard that account from a couple people in Shafter.
“It very well could have been inside,” said Barclay Gibson, who took the TracesofTexas.com photo in Candelaria. The practice was quite common, he said.
Barclay was surprised to hear that the strap-iron in Marfa was not brought there from Candelaria. “I hadn’t compared the two,” he said. “I just assumed they were the same.” Unfortunately, Gibson—who has photographed many jails and other landmarks around the state—didn’t know any more on the subject of the Shafter jail.
The fact that towns even smaller than Shafter had strap-iron jails makes an assumption that Shafter, with thousands of residents, likely had a jail of some sort. Since there’s still no evidence defining what it was like, feel free to email me at rob@bigbendsentinel.com with any additional information.
