Old Jail Managed to Outlive Its Usefulness in Just 128 Years

When the contractors finished his work in 1871, the sheriff’s home and jail was hailed as a state-of-the-art monument to law and order, a credit to the county. Considering that it replaced “a so-called jail” where notorious types were “chained to the floor,” it probably wasn’t hard to make that claim. That first prison in Elkton (about where the People’s Bank stands on North Street), had been built about 1791 to house murderers, horse and chicken thieves, debtors, drunkards, and the unruly. Eventually, the county seat’s first facility for inmates became so “unfit as a place of detention” that Civil War era courts threatened to send prisoners to Baltimore and charge the county for the expense. The county thus decided it had to build a new sheriff’s home and jail.

There were few sad faces at the demise of the old jail. Passing by, as heavy sledges “were wielded by strong men” tearing down the building, the Cecil Whig’s editor wrote that he felt like saying, “peace be to its remains,”

For those who ran afoul of the law, there were 20 cells at the new prison, surely enough to “accommodate any demand that Cecil County culprits” could place on it, said the Whig. Sheriff Thomas, the first official to turn the key and swing open the wide heavy grated iron door, let in his “house guests.” In the years to come, those cells would have their own stories to tell and the jailhouse walls would stand as silent witnesses to more than a few tragic scenes.

Out in the old jailyard, more than one man would draw his final breath at the end of the hangman’s noose. The last hanging occurred where the Buckworth Senior Center is today in October 1905. Calvin Merritt, “who had built all the scaffolds used there in the past thirty-five years,” erected the gallows on the south side of the jail yard, said the Elkton Appeal. Sheriff George Biddle and Deputy Wes McAllister ascended the platform with the inmate. On the stand, the sheriff placed the noose around the doomed man’s neck and a black cap over his head. The trap door fell open, the body shot downward and his neck was broken. The man, who had been convicted of murdering a prominent Elkton judge, Albert Constable, had paid the full penalty for the crime. There were also hangings in 1893 and 1895.

The first whipping in Cecil County since colonial times happened in 1896, according to the Whig. The cat-o-nine tails were plied by Sheriff Harvey Mackey to a prisoner who had been convicted of beating his wife. Nearly a hundred people witnessed the lashing in the north jail yard, where the whipping post was set up.

One early spring day in 1912, as the county felt the first tentative nudge of the approaching season’s warmth, a cold-blooded shooting in the outer yard snuffed out the young life of a Cecil County Sheriff. The incident took place when Sheriff J. Myron Miller attempted to take a pistol away from a trustee who had refused to obey an order. As the officer forcibly tried to take the weapon, the inmate, Antonio Ducca, placed the muzzle of the guan against the sheriff’s side and fired the fatal shot. Bystanders, running to aid the stricken officer, overpowered Ducca and got the gun away from him.

Not satisfied with life behind bars, a few inmates escaped jail. Deep into a July night in 1919, a chicken thief held at the jail began to unlock doors. Being careful not to make a sound that might alert the sheriff and his family sleeping nearby, he first sawed off the lock on his cell. Then, down the dark corridor, he crept to make short work of a few more iron-barred doors. Long before good light, the man and six other prisoners were over the jail yard wall.

A modern detention center started sprouting out of a cornfield at the edge of town early in the 1980s. Then, in January 1984, in a secret nighttime operation, Sheriff John F. DeWitt moved inmates from the Cecil County Jail in the center of Elkton to Landing Lane. Steel-barred doors opened and closed electronically, and the moves were remotely monitored by deputies in a secure control center while the inmates settled into their cells. An era had ended.