By population, Crawford County ranks eighty-sixth out of Indiana’s ninety-two counties. It’s eightieth in terms of size. The county seat, English, is home to a scant 685 people! I didn’t expect much of a courthouse when I visited, but I certainly didn’t anticipate the tiny old jail tucked alongside it. It’s hard to believe it served until 2004!
Crawford County was in a pickle in the early 1950s. Condemned for more than thirty years, its jail had been out of use since 1947 while prisoners were housed in neighboring Harrison County1. In 1950, an $8,000 modernization of the fifty-four-year-old building was included in the county’s 1951 budget2. Instead, it appears that a replacement was built in 1953.
Crawford County’s new jail sat near the old residence of the county sheriff, a building that was long-demolished by the time I rolled into town. The jail, a two-story concrete block structure, featured a first floor with room for a patrol car, a counselor, a furnace, and restrooms. The upper story housed the Sheriff’s office and detention rooms. One prisoner spent the day at the jail the day it opened, but three spent the night3. Five years later, a new courthouse was built just north.
The old jail in English was tiny, but that was on purpose: initially, it was built as a simple holdover for inmates until they could be taken to another county. Eventually, though, the building was used full-time: the garage was filled in to make room for two cells; one for female inmates and another for jail trustees who helped clean and do laundry. A single-story “lean-to” addition was built to the east in the 1970s to make room for a proper sheriff’s office4. With that final change, the building topped out at fourteen bunks5.
Who knows how long the old Crawford County Jail might have served if not for English’s location on the intersection of three creeks. Generally shallow and tame, the waters could get nasty pretty quickly after significant rainfall6. English suffered catastrophic floods in 1959, 1964, 1979, and 1990, when literal tons of water were deposited in the center of the village. One flood even destroyed the contents of the county library! Eventually, officials decided to up and move the entire town7. The process took a decade and $20 million, but most of English was relocated by 1999.
Along with the town’s 1958 Crawford County Courthouse, the old jail remained in use until 2004, when the L-shaped Crawford County Judicial Complex was completed in “New” English northeast of the original community. The seventy-four-bed jail facility8 rendered the old structure a useless antique, but a private party expressed interest in buying the building as late as 2007. Unfortunately, the jail was next to worthless. “We’d probably have to put a quarter in it and sell it for 25 cents,” a county commissioner joked in 20079.
Officials contemplated demolishing the vandalized building soon afterward, but it was still standing nine years later when I visited. I must have made it in the nick of time, though, since Google Earth indicates the old jail was demolished sometime between 2016 and 2019. With it went an unglamorous part of Crawford County’s history.
Sources Cited
1 50 Years Ago 1953 (2003, June 11). The Corydon Clarion News. p. 18.
2 Funds Voted To Modernize Old Crawford County Jail (1950, August 13). The Evansville Courier and Press. p. 11.
3 (See footnote 1).
4 Cable, L. (2007, March 7). Crawford County Jail: 1952-2004. The Corydon Clarion News. p. 15.
5 Adams, C. (2003, December 3). Crawford jail, courthouse coming along. The Corydon Democrat. pp. 11, 16.
6 Counts, Will; Jon Dilts (1991). The 92 Magnificent Indiana Courthouses. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Print.
7 “English residents unsold on move to high ground” The Indianapolis News [Indianapolis]. July 18, 1990. 45. Print
8 (See footnote 5).
9 (See footnote 5).
