In Days Gone By: The early years of the Edmonds jail

Early Edmonds Incarceration (1892 – 1934)

Imagine waking up from a heavy night of drinking and revelry, probably with a severe headache and finding yourself in a room with one dimly lit light bulb, several cots, a strong stench, and a large wooden bucket to use to relieve yourself. Through a heavy wooden door with three or four metal bars you can see outside, but there is no one around and no one responds to your cries for help. Welcome to the Edmonds’ first jail.

Why would you have found yourself in this situation? It was probably because you had violated a section of the City of Edmonds’ Ordinance 25.

Ordinance 25 – An ordinance defining and prescribing the punishment of certain misdemeanors. Enacted June 1892 by Edmonds City Council and Mayor W.H. Hamlin

An earlier article, Edmonds (1908 – 1909) The tale of two cities, chronicled that Edmonds — nearly two decades after being incorporated — was essentially two cities. But even before Edmonds was incorporated in 1890, the lower section of town from the waterfront up to 2nd Avenue, and from George (Main) Street north to Edmonds Street, was a rough area.

As the city grew, shingle mills and logging became the main industry, with between 200 and 500 men frequenting the town on any given weekend. On weekends, multiple saloons, cardrooms, boarding houses and brothels served men, along with professional gamblers and other questionable visitors.

Conversely, the upper portion of town was a growing business district and residential area with a total population of 350 by 1892.

Unfortunately, patrons who were intoxicated and unruly from the lower section of town often spilled over into the upper section of town, causing consternation amongst Edmonds’ permanent residents.

In June 1892, a year and a half after incorporation, the Edmonds City Council enacted Ordinance 25, which clearly defined unacceptable behaviors that would potentially lead to fines or incarceration or both. Ordinance 25 was broken into two parts.

Part 1 listed behaviors that were ordained as offenses against public peace and quiet. They ranged from disturbing the peace via threatening or vulgar language, minor thefts, to assault and battery or drawing a gun, knife, dagger or other deadly weapon.

Part 2 listed behaviors that were ordained as offenses against public decency and morals. They ranged from cruelty to animals or laying out poisonous meat to nudity and discharging firearms and vagrancy.

Interestingly, vagrancy as defined included a wide range of possible offenses.

The definition of vagrancy in Ordinance 25 read as follows.

“All persons who tell fortunes or keep houses where lost or stolen goods may be found; all common prostitutes, or where keepers of bawdy house or houses for the resort of prostitutes;  all habitual drinkards, gamesters, or other disorderly persons; all persons wandering about all and having no visible calling or business to maintain themselves,  persons going about as collectors of Alms for charitable institutions under any false or fraudulent pretense; all persons playing or betting in any street or public or open place, at or with any table or instrument of gameing at any game or pretended game of chance, shall be deemed vagrants; and any person who shall be convicted of being a vagrant shall be fined not less than five dollars nor more than one hundred dollars, or be imprisoned for any time not exceeding thirty days, or be both fined and imprisoned.”

Author’s note: $5 in 1892 today would have the purchasing power of $175 and 1892’s $100 would be equivalent to $3,500 today.

The reality of enforcement

The city’s apparent intent was to have the worst offenders arrested, incarcerated overnight and then taken before a judge the next day, fined and released. Essentially the city jail was designed to be a short-term “holding” facility.

However, according to multiple historical accounts it was not uncommon to see “drunken willies” sleeping on the sidewalks, streets or in front of a store’s door on any given morning.  The harsh reality was, there was only a single marshal or sheriff to enforce the laws 24/7. On some occasions one or two deputies were added, although they had no authority outside the city limits.

If you were the sheriff, what criteria would you use to arrest one of the “drunken willies” over another?

In looking at articles up to 1910 in the Edmonds Tribune-Review regarding arrests and people being jailed, the preponderance of the offenses had to do with 1) petty thefts, 2) people who were acting irrationally/possibly insane, or 3) people who were temporarily being held before being transported to the county jail.

Perpetrators of more serious crimes were transported to the county jail in Everett where they were incarcerated and then went before a Snohomish County magistrate for possible sentencing and fines.

Edmonds’ first city jail

There are no known pictures of Edmonds’ first city jail or its exact location. However, gleaning from several City Council meeting notes and other early memoirs it’s believed that the jail was located on the northwest side of 5th Avenue North between Bell and Edmonds Streets.  In the late 1800s that location would have been away from the growing downtown area, on the north border of the city limits and near another wooden building that was used part time as Edmonds City Hall.

According to several historical accounts, the conditions surrounding the first city jail were questionable at best. There was no guard. Once arrested and confined, the prisoners were only checked on at meal times. The upkeep of the facility apparently was horrid. There isn’t any better description of the jail’s condition than notes from an Edmonds City Council meeting that was published June 23, 1911.

The report read: “The first matter was the consideration of a bill for $2 for last month’s lighting bill at the jail. Inasmuch as the jail is seldom occupied these days the council appeared to think two lights were an unnecessary and costly luxury. The bill was ordered to be paid, however, but an effort will be made to have one light cut out until next winter anyway.

This discussion brought on the matter of the jail itself, which was reported to be in a frightfully unsanitary condition and councilman Bassett feared that if someone was arrested and confined there, the said arrested party would have good cause for damages against the city. After a humorous discussion it was voted that the jail be thoroughly fumigated, whitewashed and the bedding be burned. It was also understood that the marshal would refuse free lodgings to wanderers at least until bad weather this fall.”

It is interesting to note that the marshal was apparently not arresting people for vagrancy when they arrived in town without any means, as the law prescribed.  Instead, he had been providing free lodging at the jail if it wasn’t already occupied.  This was possibly one way of his lessening the number of people sleeping on the street, in alleys or in store wells.

It is believed the jail had two large rooms, each lit by a single lightbulb.

Novel escape attempts from the first city jail.

Early memoirs state that prisoners had attempted to break down the outer walls of the building to escape by using parts of the beds as a ramping device. Others had broken sections of the floor near the exterior wall and had tried to tunnel out.

Additionally, on at least two occasions, prisoners who had been imprisoned during the jail’s later years had tried to burn the building down while incarcerated.

Introduction of cars and prohibition compounds needs for law enforcement.

In 1910 the first cars appeared in Edmonds, driven by wealthy early-adopters from Seattle. A.M. Yost — seated in the back seat in the photo below — was the first Edmonds resident to own a car in 1911.

Edmonds passed additional ordinances specifying fines and imprisonment for excessive noise from automobile horns, whistles etc. and for speeding or reckless driving.

By the start of the 1920s it was estimated that there were around 200 car owners in the Edmonds area, although the roads remained difficult to navigate at times.

In 1920, the 18th Amendment also passed, and the enactment of Prohibition made it illegal to have or consume alcohol. The mixture of automobiles and alcohol placed an additional burden on law enforcement at a local, state and federal level.

In Edmonds, the long-used wooden jail continued to be the “holding place” for local offenders until 1922.

New City Jail opens in 1922

Early in 1922 the Carnegie Library Building was upgraded from a coal- and wood-burning furnace to radiant heat provided by radiators on the walls.  With the upgrade of the heating system, the space that had originally been the coal bin was converted into a one-cell jail.  The earliest descriptions state that it had a heavy metal door, a small window with iron bars on the south side of the room, a bunk bed, radiator, sink and toilet. The ceiling was made of lath (i.e. narrow wood strips) and plaster.

The first arrestees to spend a night in the new jail were two men who were detained on Aug. 2, 1922, for reckless driving and being intoxicated. The new jail over the next 12 years housed many of the same types of offenders as the old jail. But as the following articles attest, offenders were now also arrested for driving mishaps or possession of alcohol.

It is interesting to note that in the second article, the City Council claimed that the police judge was too lenient on the suspect’s sentencing, but the judge stated that the City jail was not suitable to retain prisoners for any length of time. His reasoning probably included the fact that the jail could only house two inmates at a time, and it was better to release them after they were sober and fine them later, than to have no room in the jail for the next set of offenders.

Secondly, the number of successful escapes were numerous. On several occasions friends came into the unattended jail and broke their friend(s) out.  On another occasion a prisoner pried the bars on the jail door apart using a 2-by-6-foot slat from his bunk bed.

Reports of successful escapes included:

In a separate tongue-in-cheek article in the November 1932 edition of the Edmonds Tribune-Review, written by Edmonds City Marshal W. J. Hudson, it was stated that the Edmonds City Jail rivaled the King County Jail for its “break-proof” nature. But as Hudson pointed out, you didn’t have to cut through the iron bars at the Edmonds jail, you could just escape through the ceiling, as a prisoner had done the previous week.

Less than two months later Chief of Police Walter C. Hansen went before the City Council stating that the jail was inadequate, because it was too small to handle the number of arrestees.  Furthermore, at times the arrestees included a woman, and the police could not jail a woman and a man in the same cell.

Despite the concerns expressed by the city’s police officers and police judge, the City Council did not take action to remedy the noted problems.  This may have been due in part to the fact that Edmonds was beginning to feel the effects of the Great Depression. For whatever reason the jail remained the same. Additionally, matrons were not employed until the late 1930s, six years after the request.

In Reflection: Soon after Edmonds was incorporated in 1890, ordinances were passed outlining behaviors and conduct that would result in fines and potential incarceration.  Despite the ordinances, law enforcement and the city jail system were ill equipped to enforce the city’s laws. In 1892 there was one sheriff, or marshal, and the city jail was either not well-kept or too small to temporarily house the offenders.

Many of the offenses went unpunished, setting a dangerous underpinning for the city. Given this reality it is not surprising to read in the oldest memoirs by Frances Anderson, Mertie Rynearson and others that they were forbidden to go near the waterfront or the lower part of town without an adult accompanying them.

It is also worth noting that there were a couple of events that had a major impact on the city’s law enforcement’s ability to fully uphold the laws. In 1911, the city voted to go “dry” — nine years before prohibition. The loss of funds from saloon and cardroom licenses put the city in dire financial shape, which resulted in cutbacks of city services. Two years later the city again was “wet.” The changing of the laws regarding saloons/cardrooms being legal or not put an extra burden on law enforcement.

Secondly, in 1923, the first automobile ferries from Edmonds to Kingston and later Edmonds to Port Ludow brought hundreds of people to Edmonds. In some cases, the wait times were more than a day. The earliest ferries only handled eight to 10 cars and there were only six daily trips. While waiting, tempers sometimes rose, especially after “putting down a few at the local watering hole.” The city eventually hired a part-time deputy to manage ferry traffic on the weekends.

Thanks to the Edmonds Historical Museum, Sno-Isle Genealogical Society, and the University of Washington Digital Collections for their assistance in researching this article.