Baytown

The 1949 Sanborn fire insurance map (Sheet 11) depicts a one-story brick jail in Baytown, Texas.  It was located at 305/405 South Main (aka South Goose Creek) adjacent (east side) to the Temple Lumber Company and apparently on their property in a storage yard.  Bernard Olive is the Assistant Fire Chief and long time resident of Baytown.  He said the jail was built in 1928, had a much larger footprint, and contained cells, municipal court, and other offices. It does not appear to conform to my definition of a calaboose.

Baytown 1949

Houston

Miki Lusk Norton, co-owner of the Lancaster Hotel in Houston, has been researching the hotel’s downtown neighborhood for more than 30 years.  Her research turned up an article in the Galveston Daily News dated May 12, 1876 that reported the following:

“In the calaboose this evening, about fifteen or twenty soiled doves were imprisoned, in default of payment of $15 fines, for infraction of the bagnio ordinance.” The Italian word bagnio originally meant bathhouse before evolving into a synonym for bordello.

The first Sanborn map that was available to me at the time of this study was published in 1877.  No buildings labelled as calaboose, jail, or any other synonym were found but a small one-story brick building next to the courthouse might be the calaboose mentioned in the newspaper article cited above.  The next Sanborn map was published in 1885 and the brick building is no longer depicted.  In that year there was a rather large brick county jail in city block 48.

Humble 

The Sanborn map dated 1936 (Sheet 1) depicts a courthouse and jail  at 412 Granbury facing railroad tracks in city block 3 (lot 11).  Behind these buildings is a small structure with a pyramid roof that is not labeled but it could have been a calaboose before this jail was built.  In 1940 both buildings were gone and the jail was combined with the fire department and city hall in the 200 block of Barrett (block 4)