My Corner Online

Jefferson City Visitor Center & Prison Museum

We visited the Jefferson City Visitor Center on August 9, 2024. Our AirBnB was directy across the street, so it was a quick walk. The next day, on August 10, after we visited the Missouri State Penitentiary, we returned to visit the Missouri State Penitentiary Museum which was in the lower level of the building.

The Visitor Center is also a historic building called The Colonel Darwin W. Marmaduke House, built in 1888, and on the National Registor of Historic Places. You can arrange for a tour of the house. It was the Warden's Residence and was also built by prison labor. They provided us with a booklet to read about the history.

The house overlooks the Missouri State Penitentiary and Col Darwin W. Marmaduke was the first warden to live in the house, but there were a total of 19 wardens that lived in the house. Personally, I would not want to raise my family so close to the State's worst felons.

This is what you see when entering the museum. It is a recreation of the cells across the street at the prison. It is a later depiction than the time period of Richard Marshall because there is electricity and a television.

Most of the prison tour and the museum were not applicable to my ancestor Richard Marshall who was there in 1866-1867. This information is about the first decades that would have applied to him. I can get an idea of how many were there in 1866 because in 1860 there were 406 inmates and in 1870 there were 734 inmates, so it would have been somewhere between those two numbers. The prison opened in 1836.

This continues the panel of information and there is an graphic of the prison, a drawing, and I thought it would show the time period of 1868 when the new A-Hall barracks was built, but unfortunately it is actually much later. The building Richard was in is not even depicted here.

This information board shows a graphic of the prison in 1954 after the riot.

This information board told me that the AirBnB we stayed in was also built by inmate or prison labor.