Old Jail

About this property

The Old Jail, also known as the Old Wilkes County Jail, located at 15 Court Street in Washington, Georgia was built in 1891. It was built by the McDonald Brothers Company of Louisville. The Old Jail has been on the list of National Register of Historic Places since June 5, 1974. It is a contributing member to the Washington Commercial Historic District, which was included on the National Register of Historic places on March 6, 1986. The Old Jail was built in 1891 and was designed by the McDonald Brothers Jail Building Company of Louisville. Kentucky. It replaced an existing jail in Washington was considered unsafe and unsanitary. The 1891 jail was designed to meet the need for a better jail as evidenced by Grand Jury minutes from time to time starting in the 1870s. The Old Jail was built on a site owned by Wilkes County. Two earlier jails were located on the same site but in somewhat different locations. Construction of the first jail started in 1796 and was completed in 1798. It was a brick building with quarters downstairs for the jailer’s family. The prisoners were kept upstairs. A second jail was built on the site in 1817 or 1818, and it remained until the 1891 jail was built. On January 22, 1891, an $8,250 contract was awarded to the McDonald Brothers Jail Building Company to construct a new jail for the growing community. The McDonald Brothers Company was well known for its jail and public building designs throughout the South and Midwest. That Company designed and built many buildings during the last 20 years of the nineteenth century. Many of their works survive and are listed on the National Register. Three of the McDonald Brothers—Harry, Kenneth and Donald—formed the McDonald Brothers Company in 1883. The Company continued until at least 1891. The Louisville city directory listed them all as architects. Harry was president of the McDonald Brothers Building Company as well as president of the Louisville Bottle and Extract Manufacturing Company. Kenneth was the secretary of the jail company, and Donald was its general manager. Both Harry and Donald attended the engineering school of Washington College, and Donald graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1873. Many of their works survive and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The May, 1892 Superior Court Minutes of the Grand Jury expressed great satisfaction with the new jail. The Grand Jury praised the jail’s cleanliness and comfort compared with the former jail. They recommended building a fence and installing blinds for the windows. The Old Jail used an innovative heating system design which closely approached that of an experiment. It was arguably an early version of the duct or forced-air method of heating. A fire was built outside, with the hot air drawn in through a system of moat-like tunnels formed by large limestone blocks; the warm air was then vented through a large chimney. The theory was that the warm air would be conducted through the ducts and transmitted to the cells through the porous limestone walls and floor.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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