Holliday
This privately owned calaboose is located in a vacant lot in the 100 block of East Chestnut Street across from the Post Office at 100 East Chestnut Street in Holliday Texas. In the early days of the town, the first jail may have been a simple dugout. Holliday became another Texas boomtown because of the discovery of oil in the early 1920s. “The promise of money to be made created such an influx of people that “Border-trained Texas Rangers came in to ride their horses up and down the streets and alleys. Two rangers were quoted as saying that people were so thick on the streets that “… the law had to move them out so wagons and cars could get by.” 1 The town was incorporated on September 16, 1925. Judge G. A. Halloway realized the need for a better jail and he was largely responsible for getting approval to build the new concrete jail to be built on land that the city obtained from the county. A photo of this jail appears in a book by Jack Loftin entitled Trails Through Archer: A Centennial History – 1880-1980 that was published by Nortex Press in 1979. This calaboose was made of concrete using the poured in place method. It is equally divided into two cells that are secured by massive metal doors. A concrete wall on the interior separates the cells. It is 20 feet across the front and 10 feet on the sides (200 square feet). Each cell had a small window on the back wall that had nine round metal bars embedded vertically into the concrete. According to local resident Fred Maier, the holes in the doors were created by a local welder to provide ventilation to the prisoners who were complaining about the temperature inside. Mr. Maier remembered that this jail was being used to house chickens in the 1950s. There were no Sanborn maps at the agencies visited for Holliday, Texas at the time of this study. This structure conforms to Floor Plan 2a (see Floor Plans). It has been recorded at TARL as historic site 41AR10.
END NOTES
1 History of Holliday, Texas privately published by Jeanine Goble Hodge in 1972, page 48