Historical Marker
Tennessee State Penitentiary
Nashville, Davidson County · Tennessee
The second penitentiary opened on February 12, 1898, with 800 cells meant for one prisoner each, and admitted 1,403 prisoners that day. Overcrowding never really ended. Its fortress design copied the Auburn penitentiary in New York, known for lockstep marching, striped uniforms, solitary nights and silent daytime work, and it followed the 1893 end of convict leasing. For the first time the state also provided a separate women's building with matrons. Breakouts marked the decades: prisoners blew out the end of a wing in 1902, killing one inmate, and in 1907 convicts drove a switch engine through a gate.
What the plaque says
Tennessee State Penitentiary Located along the Cumberland River at Cockrill Bend, the Tennessee State Penitentiary operated here from 1898 to 1992. Nicknamed "the Castle," the fortress-like complex was designed by Chattanooga architect Samuel Patton, with a central administration building flanked by five-story cell block wings segregated by race and gender. The maximum security prison was closed by a federal court decision due to perpetual overcrowding and poor conditions. Continued Located behind 20-foot stone walls, the self-supporting campus included a hospital, chapel, industrial shops, cafeteria, gym, and a death house where 125 prisoners were executed from 1916 to 1960. The prison is associated with popular culture through film and music as a result of having produced an inmate band The Prisonaires, having hosted concerts by Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Linda Ronstadt, and Eddy Arnold, and having served as the setting for films such as The Last Castle and The Green Mile.
Where it stands
36.17162, -86.86320 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 3.3 miThe 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.
- Tennessee State Capitol — 4.4 miWilliam 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.
- Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 4.6 miA 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 — 4.8 miA downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.