Uncovered cells to be included on MSP tours

Mark Schreiber looks inside one of the Centennial Cells and recounts some of their history Thursday during a tour. The cells and believed to have been part of Centennial Hall, which is no longer standing, and built in the mid-1800s or so.
Mark Schreiber looks inside one of the Centennial Cells and recounts some of their history Thursday during a tour. The cells and believed to have been part of Centennial Hall, which is no longer standing, and built in the mid-1800s or so.

A new piece of Missouri State Penitentiary's history will be added to select tours beginning Saturday.

A cell block previously buried underneath a mound of dirt and grass has been uncovered on the site, providing a look back at the living conditions of prisoners of the past.

The block is estimated to have been built in the 1840s as part of a multi-story building that was eventually torn down. They are now the oldest existing portion of building on the site - an honor which previously belonged to the famous Housing Unit 4, or A Hall, built in 1868.

The cells were first uncovered in 1985 as contractors began court-ordered work to build a recreation yard near Housing Unit 3, which now looms over the buried cells.

Jefferson City Ward 5 Councilman Mark Schreiber, who was working as assistant to the prison's director of adult institutions in the '80s, was on site the day the cells were discovered.

"The contractor started digging and hit something he didn't like - as far as it being very hard and didn't move very easily - and that's when they uncovered the buried cells," Schreiber said. "I came over, brought my 35 millimeter camera and took some photographs."

Schreiber's photographs were, until last year, the only known photos of the cells, which are now called the Centennial Cells after the building they were once part of - Centennial Hall.

The cells were covered back over so the recreation yard could be built, and they were left out of sight and out of mind for decades.

Schreiber said he assumes the cells were left because of the difficulty of tearing down stone and concrete buildings without power tools.

"They didn't have jackhammers and everything like we do now, all of that was done with the old sledgehammer and pick, so they simply tore them down to a level they thought they could manage it and covered everything else up."

The stone cells are small, with short doors that would force a taller individual to bend to enter, although the ceiling arches up a bit once inside.

Rusted metal bars, made by blacksmiths, still cross most of the doorways, the only remnants of the wooden doors which once held the inmates inside.

Due to the lack of any visible anchors to the walls for bunks, Schreiber said it's possible the cells did not have true beds but possibly only piles of straw or something else on the ground.

"There wouldn't have been any light in there or anything," he said. "It was very, very primitive. Back in those days, unfortunately, there were no conditions of confinement or human rights standards. That didn't exist."

In 2019, the Jefferson City Convention and Visitor's Bureau and the Missouri Office of Administration's Division of Facilities Management, Design and Construction crews began work to uncover the cells with the hope of being able to share the history with tour guests.

The CVB operates tours of the prison, typically led by previous prison employees to provide a personal touch of history.

The buried cells will now be part of the three-hour history tour, the ghost hunt tours and the overnight paranormal investigation.