Hope Jail

Sitting in the backyard of Mr. Palmer’s home is a single cell jail. “It came with the house when I bought three years ago. The home used to belong to the town banker.” How it ended up in his backyard he has no idea.

If this cell is the Hope Jail then it was purchased in 1911 from the E.T Barnum Iron Works Co. which specialized in making jail cells. A newspaper in November 1911 said this, ABILENE MAN SPENT NIGHT IN HOPES NEW JAIL “Apparently this Abilene man who he is, that is the question, preferred a brand new jail in which to spend the night, rather than to take a nights lodging in Abilenes aged calaboose. The Hope Dispatch says: Yesterday was boozers day in Hope, according to many reports to the Dispatch, but only one man slept in our new jail. This one was an Abilene horse doctor who went crazy after he went to bed at the hotel, tore up the room and tried to throw the bed out of the window without taking it apart. The marshal was called and took the said doctor to the cooler. And this morning he pleaded guilty and asked the mercy of the court. He was fined the small sum of $2 and costs.”

With the town being quite small with not much boom in population the jail didnt get much use. The yearly expenditures for the city of Hope were published in the newspaper in 1918. In those expenditures was “S.W. Tobey removing jail cell…$4.50”. One can only assume this is when the jail cell was no longer needed and somehow ended up in different hands.

Gallery Below of Hope Jail

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