The history of Boise
Boise's recorded history here centres on one ground: the Old Idaho State Penitentiary, east of the city, built from 1870 by inmate labour and operated for 101 years as the territorial and state prison until a 1973 riot closed it. It is now a museum.
East Old Penitentiary Road in Boise sits inside the Old Idaho State Penitentiary, built from 1870 by inmate labour using quarried sandstone and operated as Idaho's territorial and state prison until a 1973 riot forced its closure after 101 years; it is now a museum run by the Idaho State Historical Society.
Inmates quarried the sandstone that built their own walls
Old Idaho State Penitentiary is now a museum, run by the Idaho State Historical Society, but for over a century it was a working prison. Idaho was still seven years from statehood when workers broke ground here on July 4, 1870, in a public ceremony. President Andrew Jackson had approved $40,000 for the project, and architect Charles May designed it to federal specifications.
The first building, called the Territorial Prison, opened in 1872. Eleven men arrived from the Boise County Jail and were put straight to work. They quarried sandstone from the ridges around Table Rock, the same stone that built the walls still standing around this point. Inmates kept building the prison for decades, raising a 17-foot sandstone wall and the cell houses behind it with their own labor.
When Idaho became a state in 1890, the Territorial Prison took a new name: the Idaho State Penitentiary. Growth followed fast. The New Cell House went up between 1889 and 1890, three tiers of steel cells with the top tier, closest to what is now the Rose Garden, set aside as Death Row. James King designed the Administration Building that followed in 1893 and 1894, holding the warden's office and the armory.
Conditions stayed hard. The sandstone walls trapped summer heat and winter cold, and the prison had no proper plumbing until the 1920s. Over its full run, more than 13,000 people passed through as inmates, 216 of them women. At least 110 died here, from old age, illness, suicide, or violence.
A convicted bomber became the prison's longest-serving inmate
In 1905, Harry Orchard arrived at the penitentiary carrying one of Idaho's biggest crimes. Orchard had assassinated former Governor Frank Steunenberg with a bomb, revenge for the government's role in the violent 1890 mining disputes around Coeur d'Alene. Orchard confessed to killing at least 17 men for union terrorism, yet he settled into prison life as a model inmate. He spent 46 years behind these walls, longer than anyone else ever held here.
Women had no real quarters of their own in the prison's early decades. In 1905, male inmates built a stone wall around the warden's old house so female prisoners could move in there instead. A proper Women's Ward followed in 1920, with its own cells, kitchen and day room. Lyda Southard, known across Idaho as the "Lady Bluebeard" for killing husbands to collect their life insurance, later served time inside that same ward.
By the 1930s, the original Territorial Prison building, the one those first eleven men had opened in 1872, no longer held inmates. The prison converted it into a chapel instead, a quieter use for the oldest structure on the grounds.
Rioting inmates set fires twice in two decades
Conditions inside kept breeding violence. On May 24, 1952, around 300 prisoners rioted for five hours, setting fire to a dormitory before guards drove them back with tear gas.
Trouble returned on August 10, 1971. Guards had discovered two escape tunnels and closed the cooler block in response. Inmates set fires in the bakery and the social services building, and two men were stabbed before the four-hour riot ended.
A botched hanging took fifteen minutes to kill a man
On the night of October 18, 1957, guards led Raymond Snowden to the gallows room. He had murdered Cora Lucyle Dean in nearby Garden City the year before, a crime that earned him the nickname "Idaho's Jack the Ripper." The drop failed to break his neck, and he took roughly fifteen minutes to die. Snowden was the last person executed in Idaho before the nation's death penalty moratorium began in 1972, and the last ever hanged in the state. Ten men were executed here in all, six of them in the walled yard now planted as the Rose Garden, the rest inside the building itself.
A riot's fires forced the penitentiary to close
The end came fast. On March 7 and 8, 1973, rioting inmates set fires that tore through the complex. The old Territorial Prison building, by then a chapel, burned down completely, along with the Dining Hall. The state gave up on the site. On December 3, 1973, the remaining 416 inmates moved out to a new correctional institution south of Boise, and the penitentiary closed for good after 101 years.
The following year, on July 17, 1974, the Old Idaho State Penitentiary joined the National Register of Historic Places.
A cat buried inside the walls became its only pet inmate
The Idaho State Historical Society now runs the grounds as a museum. Visitors walk past cell houses, the Rose Garden where six men died on the gallows, and the J. Curtis Earl Memorial Exhibit of historic firearms. A small grave inside the walls belongs to Dennis, a cat inmates kept for sixteen years until his death in 1968, the only "inmate" ever buried on-site. The Idaho Botanical Garden now occupies the old prison farm just beyond the walls, built on ground that once grew food for the men locked inside.
The sandstone walls the first inmates quarried in 1872 still enclose the grounds, now open for visitors to walk through.
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