Wasco County’s original jail gets door back

Jan 01, 2024

Visitors to the Original Wasco County Courthouse can now peer through an elegant reproduction of the original iron-barred jail door, designed by docent Chris Bolton and paid for by a grant from Northern Wasco County PUD.

Since restoration in the ‘70s, the county’s first courthouse had wooden jail doors. Until three words of description in an undated, uncredited newspaper clipping set Bolton on the trail of the lost original iron doors, destroyed in the mid-1900s, and inspired him to design the reproduction.

How the doors were lost is tied to the courthouse’s own journey through several ownerships and six locations. First built in 1958 at the corner of Third and Court streets, it’s survived — albeit minus all the jail doors — moving, renovation, near incineration, and flooding five feet deep in 1894.

In about 1883, the original courthouse became too small. One thing saved it from being torn down and replaced, according to Bolton: There was no room on the lot for expansion. So a second courthouse, now Clocktower Ales, was built. In 1914, that also became too small. But Clocktower, too, was as big as its lot. Courthouse number three was built, and active ever since, seems to have solved the problem.

In 1909, the first move: The original courthouse went to the diagonal side of the intersection to make room for City Hall. A year later, local blacksmith Mattias Schoren bought it and stuck it at the corner of Third and Federal to become an unofficial boarding house for 51 years. The original jail door vanished during this time. In that undated clipping, probably published in The Dalles Chronicle in the early 1940s, Schoren’s widow Christena Eymont recounted having the “heavy bar iron” doors, then adorning her parlor, removed and sold for junk. That’s their only surviving description.

Next, the courthouse went to Thompson Park in 1961, to make space for a parking lot. “They were just on the verge of tearing it down or something,” Bolton said, when some locals urged preservation. “The City gave it to them,” Bolton said, “but — they had to move it!”

So the courthouse’s new owners set it on a private lot, then later put it near the Chamber of Commerce, and set about restoring it circa 1971.

Restored, the courthouse moved to its current location, 410 E. Second Place. There to remain ... well, probably. You never know, Bolton noted. It does have a history of peregrinating.

It is, however, a very structurally sound building. Made with lumber milled in Mosier, solid lathe and plaster, it’s a perfect square, handy for relocating: Just load it up, put some draft animals or engines in front of it, and off you go, Bolton said.

Restorers found just three historical photos, Bolton said, each by a different photographer and from a different angle. They didn’t know what the jail doors were made of. Antelope had wooden jail doors. The restorers copied those.

Then someone uncovered that clipping, and Bolton started thinking. “The daughters of the blacksmith said they had no idea what they looked like, but iron bars is iron bars,” he stated.

Bolton went to The Dalles Ironworks, and talked the project over with the door’s creators. Before arc welding, the original would have been flat iron riveted together, with holes either drilled or punched to insert the bars, he said.

Arc welding, which leaves a visible seam, could only be used on the edge of the new door, hidden against the wall. Rivets were inserted, then welded in place from the back, for strength. “Otherwise it would be kind of ramshackle,” Bolton explained.

A not-insignificant detail: The new door has no locks. The person who built the original submitted a bill to the city commissioners in 1858, “and they wrote back and said, ‘We can’t help but notice none of the doors have locks,’” Bolton explained. Bolton assumes they just padlocked prisoners in.

With no photographic evidence, it isn’t an exact replica. “It’s as much Disneyland as it is historically accurate,” Bolton’s notes for the project read.

“We’re trying to get this building as authentic as possible, having almost no articles and almost no photographs,” he said. “You can fudge the ideas but you can’t make flying leaps. ... It’s got to look like a jail door and feel like a jail door.”

Funding came through a grant from North Wasco County PUD. “They payed for it all. It was very generous,” Bolton noted. “What I found interesting, just in my own sense of irony ... that door cost almost as much as the whole building cost us” to build in the 1800s. The new door is about $2,200; originally, the courthouse cost just 300 bucks more. It had three jail cells.

Those cells were built for two people apiece, “although I suspect on a Saturday night, things have become a trifle crowded,” Bolton remarked. In the early days of operation, this was the only courthouse between Independence, Mo., and Portland. Bolton estimates about 5,000 people passed through The Dalles in 1864 alone, some of them stopping for a spell behind iron bars. “It was the last vestige of civilization heading east,” Bolton said. “So if you wanted to have one more bottle of whiskey ... this was the place.”

In more than 24 years of operation, only two capital trials ended in hanging; most records involve boring civil stuff — and whiskey. “There are a few old court record books and they all read drunk and disorderly, drunk and disorderly, drunk and disorderly....”

One cell is now a public bathroom, one storage, and the third — newly barred — a museum of chains, balls, and antiquated restraints on permanent loan from the Wasco County Sheriff’s Office. In back hangs the only artifact retained from its first incarnation: A woven lunch basket, for fetching meals (probably the ubiquitous salmon, Bolton thinks) to prisoners.

The new door is much more popular with modern tourists. It’s incredible “how many people want to go to jail,” Bolton joked. “People love having their picture taken behind bars. We have to tell ‘em ... don’t smile, you’re in jail!”

Demonstrating, he shut the new door with an ominously final BANG. “It’s got that go-to-jail sound,” he added, with real satisfaction.

More information about the courthouse is online at www.originalwascocountycourthouse.org. Email [email protected], call 503- 505-4121, or mail P.O. Box 839, 410 W. Second Place, The Dalles.

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