Yuma Territorial Prison State Historic Park

The territorial legislature authorized a prison in 1875 and budgeted $25,000 for it. Ground was broken on a bluff above the Colorado River in Yuma on April 28, 1876, and some of the first prisoners were put to work building their own cells. The first seven inmates moved in on July 1, 1876. Over the next 33 years 3,069 prisoners passed through, 29 of them women, for crimes ranging from murder to polygamy. The best known is the stagecoach robber Pearl Hart, and the roll also included the train robber Burt Alvord and the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón. The prison was always under construction, with inmate labour, and by 1909 it was so overcrowded that all prisoners were moved to a new prison in Florence.

The buildings had a long second life. After Yuma's high school burned, classes were held in four prison buildings from 1910 to 1914, and the school's teams became known as the Criminals. The county hospital used the site from 1914 to 1923. In 1924 the Southern Pacific Railroad cut away the western third of Prison Hill for new tracks. The Veterans of Foreign Wars used the guards' quarters as a clubhouse from 1931 to 1960, and in the 1920s and 1930s hobos riding the trains and homeless families of the Depression slept in the cells. Local residents began raising money in 1939 to restore the guard tower and build a museum on the site of the mess hall. On October 4, 1960, the City of Yuma sold the prison to the state for one dollar, and it opened as a state historic park on January 1, 1961.

You can walk into the original strap-iron cells and the solitary dark cell, and see the water tank, the guard tower, the sally port entrance gate, the library room, caliche hill and the new yard. Interpretive panels are spread through the site, and Wikipedia records a graveyard where 104 prisoners are buried. The 3,600-square-foot museum has a video, original artifacts and exhibits on the staff and convicts, and a large mural of Arizona Native Americans and scenery painted by an Italian prisoner of war during the Second World War. Photographs of the paintings are not allowed.

The prison has a strong hold on Western fiction: Elmore Leonard's story Three-Ten to Yuma became the 1957 and 2007 films. A picnic area above the river looks across to California, and a short side trail joins the Yuma East Wetlands Trail through a 400-acre restored wetland. Pets are not allowed in the park.