A warden's house built by prison inmates
East Capitol Avenue in Jefferson City holds the Warden's House, built in 1887–88 by Missouri State Penitentiary inmates for the prison's first warden, Colonel Darwin W. Marmaduke. Eighteen wardens lived there until 1991. Remodeled in 1907 by architect Morris Frederick Bell, it now houses the Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Missouri State Penitentiary Museum.
Eighteen wardens lived beside the walls they ran
For a century after Marmaduke, the house stayed what it was built to be: the warden's address. Eighteen wardens in turn were given the residence by the State of Missouri, raising families within sight of the walls they ran. Later, as the prison's administration changed, the house also served as home for the Superintendent of Penal Institutions. Through all of it, the penitentiary itself kept operating next door, one of the oldest prisons west of the Mississippi still in daily use.
Outside the warden's front door, East Capitol Avenue and Lafayette Street carried a very different history. Lafayette Street was the center of Jefferson City's segregated Black neighborhood, a community known as "The Foot," with its own homes, businesses and churches built up through the 1800s and early 1900s. In 1962, the city's Campus View Urban Renewal Program tore most of that neighborhood down, clearing blocks between East McCarty and East Dunklin streets in the name of redevelopment. The warden's house, built by prison labor, stood through the demolition of the free Black community that had grown up a short walk from its porch.
An architect stripped the house of its castle roof
By 1907, architect Morris Frederick Bell reworked the house, giving it the plainer gabled roof it still has. Bell had arrived in Missouri in 1869 with $2.50 in his pocket and went on to design college halls and state institutions across the state. At the warden's house he swapped the clear glass skylight for stained glass and bricked in or covered some of the fireplaces.
The prison fell but its warden's house stood
The penitentiary closed for good in 2004, after 168 years of continuous use, ending the reason the warden's house existed in the first place. The limestone walls that once loomed over this corner came down around redevelopment that followed. The house itself survived. Today it holds the Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Missouri State Penitentiary Museum, telling the story of the prison that built it.
Nearby, the Lester S. And Missouri "Zue" Gordon Parker House stands about 200 feet away, a brick Classical Revival home from the same Capitol Avenue Historic District.
The warden's house still stands at East Capitol and Lafayette, its tower a reminder of the prison walls that once rose beside it.
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