The stone walls in the Adirondack's

Last Sunday, on Mother's Day, we were driving towards the mountains when we stumbled across it.

I almost woke Emerald from her nap.

"Oh, wow look at that odd medieval building!" 

I shouted to Dave as we drove by.

“There it is. That’s the prison I was telling you about last week. The guys at work said they made a movie based on it.”

At first glance, 

it honestly doesn’t even look real. Coming up on it from the direction we did, it first looks like some cool castle-type of building, then the heaviness and reality of what it actually is quickly crashes in.

The intimidating stone walls mixed with the stiff guard towers standing egotistically prominent,

feels like the stone itself is going to reach into your vehicle and snatch you up just for looking too long.

Instantly, it went from, “Oh, that is a cool building!” to a sick,

strange feeling settling into the pit of my stomach within a split second.

We kept driving.

Oddly, almost immediately, another breathtaking view swept in. Incredible rolling hills, now lush green as spring was waking up, and majestic mountains layered in various shades of blue replaced the concrete view.

The heavy feeling of the prison faded quickly.

The memory did not.

Curiosity had my attention, and like a cat chasing a loose strand from a ball of yarn,

I wanted to unravel the history of that place.

Let’s travel back to the 1840s,

a remote wilderness, no town, no roads, no stores, no people, endless forests, and a vast nothingness.

Sounds like a dream, right?

Most people would think, remote getaway.

Strangely, New York State looked at this isolated stretch of Adirondack wilderness and decided it would be the perfect place to build one of the harshest prisons in the country.

Today, it's known as one of the most infamous prisons in American history.

For more than 180 years, this mountain town has been holding its secrets.

From famous escape stories, horrifying death row cases, escalated riots, and buried history,

these walls have seen it all.

1845

Even back then, productivity was in high demand. New York State was obsessed with the concept of having prisoners "pay for themselves."

In 1842, they asked inventor and businessman Ransom Cook to help design a new kind of prison.

He recommended building the prison at Dannemora specifically because of the nearby iron ore deposits.

It was a brilliant plan, to the men in suits, in the city, far away from reality.

In their briefcases they had profitable ideas of building an isolated prison in the Adirondacks, forcing prisoners to mine iron, selling the iron and industrial products, then using the profits to support the prison system!

It sounded profitable on paper,

but in reality the mining operation struggled.

The ore was difficult and transportation was brutal in the Adirondacks back then.

This resulted in the prison mine operation eventually tanking financially.

By 1877, the mining operation was abandoned.

There was still work to be done, though.

First of all, back then there wasn't a road to the prison yet. Prisoners were dropped off in Plattsburgh in shackles and forced to walk seventeen miles into the wilderness. There wasn't even a maintained trail. They began serving their time by foot in the raw Adirondack terrain.

This is near the Canadian border, where winter could turn deadly without warning.

They most likely didn't have gloves and certainly didn't have heavy-duty insulated winter clothing the way we do now. Electricity itself was still new to much of the world.

The Adirondacks at night would have been almost entirely dark.

Here's the Adirondack Mountains,

famous for views so inspirational people have written poetry and painted masterpieces based on them. This is where people go to vacation, to experience the feeling of freedom and to escape the city lights and the sounds of busy towns.

Then, there are people that come here and experience those same mountain views as a second layer of torture.

Those picturesque mountains suddenly meant beyond the prison walls it wasn’t freedom waiting.

It was miles of untouched wilderness, brutal winters without proper gear, isolation that no longer felt peaceful, and the very real possibility of dying in the mountains in a way that would have made being found feel like a relief.

That is exactly why they called it "Little Siberia."

Time flies when you are having fun.

Time inside those walls, though, clings to your soul and pulls you down. Especially in winter. A day feels like eternity and the nights are even longer.

Winters in the Adirondacks are magical, like a snow globe, when you can leave or when you have access to consistent heat.

. 

Back then, heat wasn't available like it is today. Some warmth was briefly provided through wood and coal stoves or fireplaces in the main working areas.

Mostly though, those stone cell walls held in the cold and usually stayed damp. Comfort was simply unavailable. Warmth was gained from working. Working was typically extreme and long, intense labor. There weren't labor laws, reasonable breaks, or even proper gear provided.

A prison had to be built and the prisoners were the ones doing it.

Imagine building your cage while being in those conditions.

They suffered immensely in ways we couldn’t even imagine today.

They didn't need haunted stories to keep them up at night. They were living in a tortured nightmare.

Winters were so brutal that people became mentally ill.

The isolation, the inhumane conditions, the exhaustion of trying to simply survive took a toll on everyone.

For most of human history, prisons were never really about healing people

or giving them a second chance.

They were cages.

Places meant to keep human beings alive just long enough for something even worse to happen next.

Long before modern prisons existed, people were thrown into underground cells, chained inside castle dungeons, locked in damp stone chambers, or dragged into public squares for punishments designed to humiliate, torture, exile, or kill them.

The government did not want to spend years feeding prisoners,

so punishment was often brutally fast, violent, and extremely public.

Then somewhere in the 1700 and 1800 hundreds, society started experimenting with something almost even more horrifying.

Isolation.

The idea itself feels dark. They believed if you locked someone away from the world long enough, stripped them from sunlight, took away their routine, their identity, true warmth, their purpose, and human connection, then eventually the silence itself would force repentance.

That is actually where the word “penitentiary” came from.

Somewhere between the theories written by men sitting comfortably at desks and the reality of what actually happened behind those walls, something changed.

These prisons became far more than places of punishment.

Behind the massive stone walls and iron bars were human beings slowly being worn down by brutal cold, endless labor, loneliness so deep it could swallow a person's soul, disease spreading through damp air, exhaustion that settled into the bones, and the horrifying realization that time itself could become a weapon.

In places like Dannemora, especially during winter, it must have felt like the world itself forgot you ever existed.

Many would claim prisoners deserved to suffer.

That they were simply getting what they sowed.

If somebody hurt your child, your family, or destroyed innocent lives, it becomes very easy to look at suffering and think, “Good.”

Unfortunately, history also has a way of making things unjust.

Not everybody locked behind those walls throughout history was some horrifying monster.

Some were mentally ill, some were extremely poor and made decisions based on survival, and some were children. Some simply stole food because they were trapped in systems that never really gave them a chance of escaping. Some were guilty, but some probably were not. Some committed terrible crimes and still existed inside conditions so brutal they stopped resembling punishment and started resembling slow destruction.

Places like Dannemora become complicated.

The prison itself almost feels alive in history. Not because the stone walls are haunted by ghosts floating through hallways, but because the walls absorbed generations of fear, violence, misery, anger, regret, isolation, survival, and human desperation.

You can almost feel it radiating from the structure itself, even now.

This barely scratches the surface of the history behind those walls. The more I researched Dannemora, the stranger and heavier it became.

Escape stories that sound impossible, brutal winters that pushed people past their breaking point, hidden history buried deep in the Adirondacks, old newspaper accounts, forgotten names, disturbing prison experiments, violence, survival, and stories that almost don’t even sound real anymore.

So over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of what I found.

If you want to follow along for the next stories in this prison series, you can join our little letters.