Go inside an abandoned Iowa prison full of beauty, sadness

FORT MADISON, Ia. — Leonard Harvey spent a lot of time in the dark, narrow crevice behind inmate cells. It was a favorite tactic of unruly inmates to plug a toilet and flood their cell. Harvey, plant operations manager at the Iowa State Penitentiary, navigated the walkway behind the cell to get at the plug. When an inmate heard the pipe uncapped, he flushed and sent fluids flying, usually on a new hire who didn't know better.

This was worse than getting spit at, another inmate favorite.

Lacking freedom, they used body fluids as weapons.

The stories of darkness and mystery are rich at the old prison, its first stones laid before Iowa was a state. At last it sits entirely empty, the medical wing closed a couple weeks ago, leaving it a relic of human behavior and structures to correct it. And now a group is trying to save it.

Only wind whips through the prison yard where the most violent of criminals at the maximum-security “fort” once did sit-ups inside chain-link exercise cages. Stone walls surround the vast emptiness, razor wire shining in the sun, and corner battlement towers are vacant of trained weapons specialists who for 178 years watched inmates below.

Here, near the banks of the Mississippi River in Fort Madison, a historical group of structures begins its deterioration while the state pays $1,000 a day to keep the utilities running and its grounds secure.

Some inmates housed in the new prison for men that opened in 2015 would love to see the old “hellhole” crumble down, said Judy Milks, a retired prison lieutenant who was part of a group to take us inside the walls last week.

She does not. There is too much history here in the structures, some dating to 1839 and on the National Register of Historic Places, too many stories of inmates and guards who lived, worked and died in what was the nation's oldest continuously operating prison.

Milks is part of the nonprofit Historic Iowa State Penitentiary, a group that is trying to save the prison and potentially create a museum and tourist attraction as they have in prisons in other states.

Somebody needs to come along with some money to do it. So far that isn’t happening.

As we venture into the nooks and crannies of a place that might give some people the willies, it’s as if the last renters had just upped and moved out, leaving toilet paper rolls on metal bunks and scrawled messages on cell walls.

“This was their whole world,” Milks said. “They never got outside these walls, unless they went to Iowa City for medical care.”

The new place has no stories, added Patti Wachtendorf, who started work here in her 20s and was named the penitentiary’s first female warden in 2017.

“This old place has stories,” she said. “I can almost hear them walking around, all the noises.”

The first exterior limestonewall of ancient cell block 17 has grown light with age. Back in 1839, prisoners helped construct it, and guards dug holes in the ground for them to sleep at night, said Jean Peiton, a volunteer with the nonprofit, whose mission is to save the prison for education, economic and historical purposes.

At the time, new incarceration methods were spreading nationwide, called the Auburn system. Instead of prisoners being held in large rooms before paying a fine or facing flogging or execution, the system was designed to reform prisoners with strict habits, silence and discipline while separating them into private cells at night.

A four-tiered block of cells center the stone walls, flanked by a cement walkway called a range, which correctional officers patrolled, often ducking thrown objects and insults. Most cells are roughly six feet wide, twice as long, and contain a solid metal bed frame attached to the floor and walls, a sink, toilet and two metal plates attached to the wall that act as a desk and chair.

On the top tier, another cell became famous among guards. A prisoner had painted a large frog around a sink in its open mouth. New guards were often told to find the frog to really know the prison.

Behind the block of cells is a metal utility walkway where Harvey did his plumbing. Wachtendorf said correctional officers used to quietly stand back there and listen to inmates talk. “You can learn a lot,” she said.

To the east of the oldest structure are cell blocks 18, 19 and 20, built in the Romanesque Revival style from 1913 to 1942, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Historically significant structures that are owned by the state must be maintained, per Iowa Code. Tearing them down may be difficult.

The nonprofit’s first step in its preservation is an environmental assessment that costs from $120,000 to $180,000 before deciding what buildings could be used for a historical attraction, education and even small business opportunities.

The group has asked the state to fund it. With budget shortfalls at the state and the Iowa Department of Corrections, Wachtendorf said the money just isn’t there.

“But we need to preserve this history,” she said.

Entering cell block 19, Milks had visions of her past work life here.

“It was bedlam,” she said. “I liked the excitement.

“They called them cons for a reason. I was 50 when I started; I’m 70 now. They thought they could get something over on me. Being around a while, they couldn’t. It’s the only way you got respect around here.”

She had to quit looking up their crimes.

“Baby rapers, mom killers. I had one inmate who took his mother out to eat and then killed her,” she said. “He loved to talk about it.”

The stories behind the historical walls tell not only of correctional methods but those of men and their crimes, the group said. The old timers who lived half a century here and died. The communities that formed within the walls. The practice of religion and the moments of human decency that accompanied the deviant behavior.

That’s why Mark Fullenkamp is involved. The web director at the University of Iowa grew up in Fort Madison. His mom worked at the prison and ordered the last hanging rope in 1963. When he knew it would soon close, he toured the facility and found old wooden boxes filled with glass-plate negatives of prison mugshots dating back 150 years. He has tirelessly embarked on a preservation of those mug shots ever since, as well as compiling written and oral histories of the inmates.

Photo negatives create snapshot of prison's past

The group has studied preservation efforts at penitentiaries in Pennsylvania, Missouri and Ohio. The old Mansfield, Ohio, prison has been a popular attraction because of the movie “The Shawshank Redemption.” Others, such as the prison in Jefferson City, Mo., have used ghost tours to help make money to maintain it.

“The ghost hunters are all after them,” Fullenkamp said. “They show up at meetings with T-shirts from paranormal groups.”

None in the group want to go down that road.

“You have a lot of families of people who lived here or who were victims of the people who lived here, so we need to do it respectfully,” Wachtendorf said. “People died here. People lived here. This isn’t a joke.”

As we exit the cell block, toilet paper balls are still stuck 10 feet high on the walls across from the cells. Prisoners had wet them or peed on them to toss on the walls, a sort of mummified parting message to the old place.

Into the next cell block, 20, we stand inside a tight cell. Even without the front bars closed, the walls close in quickly.

On one wall, an inmate had painted the Hawkeyes logo of the University of Iowa. This is where Milks stands to tell her stories.

She had to call for “forced cell extractions” by officers with shields and stab-proof gear. She had to take down a man who had hanged himself.

The inmates took to calling her Eva Gabor “when I was 50 pounds lighter and 20 years younger,” she said. She got sick of it because every time she came on the range, they all started whistling the theme from “Green Acres,” an old TV show Gabor starred in. One day, she demanded they call her Phyllis Diller, a comic and actor popular in the 1960s that only the old lifers knew. Somehow it stuck.

She could get along with them with “BS” and not taking crap. One day when an inmate in a top tier began yelling brutal sexual insults at her, she walked to the middle of the range in full view of the cells, spread her arms wide and leaned back to yell with a wicked smile: “Now this is prison!”

“They all laughed, even the guy yelling the insults,” she said.

“God I love this place. Isn’t it awful?”

In the theater, Fullenkamp said he recently found a receipt for what he considers the last movie shown there, “Death Games,” about an inmate using martial arts to clean up a corrupt prison. More importantly, the Art Deco seats and historical nature of the 1930s-era U-shaped structure that also housed the chow hall are in peril.

It’s deteriorating with a roof problem and window damage from a 2015 storm.

The group Preservation Iowa has the penitentiary on its 2017 list of “most endangered properties.”

“The city doesn’t want it, the state doesn’t want it, but people in these rust belt towns need something,” Fullenkamp said of one of Iowa’s most economically struggling counties (Lee). “I think we are opening minds. At first, people said you can’t do anything with that place. Then you see them thinking about it.”

“Go into a bar around here at 1 a.m.,” added Harvey, “you hear all kinds of ideas.”

Historical photographs tell many stories. Fullenkamp has ideas of projecting inmates’ historical photographs on cell walls with an audio oral history for tour groups. There are stories of the 1981 riot, when inmates took over the prison, or the 2005 escape, when two inmates fashioned a makeshift rope out of upholstery fabric and used to it climb over razor wire and leap from the stone walls, only to be captured later in nearby states.

There are the hanging gallows, right on the southeast corner of the prison walls, where Fullenkamp saw the photo of a hangman’s lowered head as he prepared an execution.

We stand there quietly looking at the corner where people far and wide came, even on river boats, to watch men hang.

“It’s the unknown,” Peiton said of the appeal inside these walls. Wondering how one survives in little cages. The vast aura of despair and occasional enlightenment of the men who lived here.

The ring of an old sweat lodge that native Americans used outside the chapel attests to past hopes. Those inmates, said the prison officials and preservationist on the tour, were not always the monsters portrayed in film. They could be normal, absent drugs or alcohol, or with medication for a mental illness.

“I stood there talking to these guys like I’m talking to you,” Harvey said. “It’s not like on TV, all those popular prison shows now. But I have to admit, I go home and watch them, and I’m in here living it every day. Doesn’t make sense.”

Many of the old inmates who fiercely protected their routines, playing dominoes on the tables aside the gymnasium floor, have passed on. The young guys who played basketball have staked out their territories in the new prison.

All that’s left here is a lot of emptiness, not a sound for the first time in 178 years.