First State Penitentiary

Tennessee argued about a penitentiary for fifteen years before it built one. A Senate committee proposed it in 1815, the legislature fought over the site from 1819 to 1827, and in 1829 it voted twenty-five thousand dollars for Church Street. The first prisoners arrived on January 1, 1831, to 200 cells. By 1858 additions had raised capacity to 352 beds, with women housed on the upper floor of the main office building, while sanitation and medical care lagged behind. Inmates worked up to sixteen hours a day, and private companies ran factories inside the walls.

What the plaque says

First State Penitentiary This corner was part of the original prison ground for the first Tennessee State Penitentiary. The prison stood on 10 acres between Church Street and Cedar Street, now Charlotte Avenue, from 15th Avenue westward. The prison opened on January 1, 1831, during the administration of Governor William Carroll. Leased convicts helped build the state capitol between 1845 and 1859. Heavily fortified during the Civil War Federal occupation of Nashville in 1862, the penitentiary housed military and political prisoners. The prison closed in 1898, during Governor Benton McMillin's term. In 2013 this corner was named Governors Corner in honor of those two men.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee State Capitol — 0.8 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.8 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 0.8 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• National Museum of African American Music — 1.0 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• Bethlehem Centers of Nashville 100th Anniversary (1894-1994) — steps away
• William Edmondson — steps away
• Grace M. Eaton/Grace M. Eaton Dayhome — 0.2 mi
• John Robert Bradley — 0.5 mi