The Wall

 As you head south on highway 10, I am sure many or most of you have seen the “big rock wall” as you drive by. I am also fairly certain that most of you know that what lies behind those walls is not only a prison, but a long history or granite and the foundation for why we call this city on the river, the “Granite City”.

The prison which formerly was called the Minnesota State Reformatory for Men was Minnesota’s third prison. It is currently a level 4 closed security prison. The first cell block that was built here was a Romanesque revival structure built by J. Walter Stevens. More importantly the second cell block, which was also built by Stevens, was structured by inmates that quarried granite from the on-site quarry. The first two cell blocks were completed around 1889. In the time near 1897, work had been started on the administration building which also followed the Romanesque look of the other two cell blocks. The administrative building was designed by Clarence H. Johnson who had much responsibility in designing a fair amount of the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities campus. Due to many work stoppages and other speed bumps, the building was finally complete around 1920. The entire building is made of granite and has a flat roof with octagonal corner roof towers, also made of granite.

The prison, in this shot you can see the quarry (filled with water – top right), that was the original granite quarry which helped build the prison. Notice that the water is on the inside of the wall and still a part of the prisons facilities. On a side note, in 1889 seventy-five prisoners were transferred to from the Stillwater State Prison to the St. Cloud Prison to help in the process of quarrying granite.

A prison is undone if it has no wall. The first job given to the prisoners in the late 1800s was the build the wall. The wall encloses and wraps around 240 acres of land and is also entirely composed of granite. The wall is four feet wide at the base and three feet wide at the top of the wall. The distance of it stretches a whopping mile-and-a-half long. The wall was quarried, dressed, and laid up entirely by the inmates at that time. The wall has a slice of notoriety as well. It currently is the largest granite wall in the United States, and is also the longest granite wall in the world to be built by exclusively by prisoner labor.