Source: "Atlanta Prison Farm photo identification cards, ms4283, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Georgia Libraries. 1956-1972"
Despite major public opposition, the Atlanta City Council voted 10-4 earlier this month to lease 85 acres of the city’s former prison farm to the Atlanta Police Foundation for a $90-million “Public Safety Training Center” for 50 years. It was hugely disappointing for so many reasons and really underscored how Atlanta has long monopolized so much of this corridor of South Dekalb at the edge of the city limits and keeps repeating so many patterns despite repeated pushback from Dekalb citizens. Some of the continuing through lines in the long-rundown, industrial area include a heavy concentration of law enforcement and correctional facilities, the ever-endangered South River and Intrenchment Creek, maxed-out municipal landfills and, of course, the sprawling city prison farm that operated for nearly a century until 1990. Another pattern I’m concerned Atlanta will repeat soon after a Public Safety Training Center breaks ground? I worry that, with no memory or conscience about what happened at the old prison farm, the city will eventually build another municipal detention center on some of that same land near the new training facility. We want to live in a city that remembers.
It was as if the Atlanta City Council already had their minds made up as soon as outgoing Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms first announced this parting gift to law enforcement earlier this year. And mere days after Bottoms awarded the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) with the 50-year lease to the old prison farm without public input, she surprised many by announcing she would not seek reelection. In a way, in that moment Bottoms threw down the gauntlet and turned the prison farm deal into a key issue in the upcoming mayoral and city council races. But, as it turns out, over the years, the Atlanta Prison Farm has shown itself to be a proving ground of sorts for Atlanta’s mayors and city councils since long before the city’s original city prison was relocated to the outskirts of the city from Glenwood Avenue near Grant Park. The original city stockade acreage, which also included a farm, actually stretched in every direction well beyond the actual main concrete, Spanish Colonial fortress on Glenwood that was completed in 1904 and still stands today, alongside a preserved structure next to it, made of Stone Mountain granite, that was once probably a stockade blacksmithing shop (gallery of images tk).
For a lot of us, an expensive, massive public safety training compound sure didn’t seem like the answer to the cries for “reimagined” policing in the wake of last year’s intense social protests over the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and, very soon after, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. It actually didn’t even seem to make sense coming from Mayor Bottoms, who urged protesters to please go home last May and to not destroy our city. But, notwithstanding two newly opened Dunkin' Donuts on this end of Moreland Avenue, maybe we should’ve seen this APF deal coming all along after the intense and immediate fallout from the Brooks murder included the resignation of APD’s Chief of Police, the ousting of Atlanta’s longtime DA, and the fatal shooting of an innocent eight-year-old little girl near the Wendy’s where Brooks died that had been overtaken by armed gang members after weeks of protests at the site. As a mother herself, and as the mayor that wished to honor the memory of the victims of the Atlanta Child Murders, I believe Secoriea Turner’s death hit Bottoms particularly hard, and surely a spate of new lawsuits and accusations that she didn’t have crime in Atlanta under control probably didn’t help. Neither has Buckhead’s racist cityhood movement helped. Threatening to break away from the City of Atlanta, Buckhead regularly uses its financial and political leverage to publicize every shooting and robbery in its area on the local evening news to make the district look like a warzone to justify its cries for more law and order. Of course they’d never place this police and fire training center in Buckhead.
But, let’s face it. This was a rushed process for a major 50-year lease, rolled out during a pandemic, when citizens haven’t even been meeting in person for hearings. Even still, hundreds of activists, social justice and environmental organizations, and residents living nearby the proposed public safety training center continuously voiced their serious concerns and overwhelming opposition during several hastily arranged windows within which to phone in public comment. The last such session occurred on Labor Day (kind of ironic, since the city prison farm provided so much labor for the city in decades past), but that didn’t stop citizens from providing around 17 hours of public comment for the city council to listen to before their disappointing vote. I hope the fight is not over.
A few things worth noting about the immediate area surrounding the former city prison farm and the proposed public safety training center.
- Atlanta’s original main city quarry, first located on original stockade land at Rosalia Street, eventually moved to Moreland Ave. & Confederate Ave. (now United Ave.), because blasting was interfering with building Girls High School. Today, a mixed-use development referred to as The Quarry, because it will incorporate the old city quarry into a greenspace plan, is underway very close to the old city prison farm. This quarry was worked by inmates from the city prison farm, and the laborers didn’t always survive the grueling, dangerous work. The WPA/PWA also briefly leased this quarry from the city in the 1930s (they also leased a quarry at Stone Mountain).
- Georgia just broke ground in late August on a new $55 million Department of Public Safety (DPS) building on United Avenue at the site of its original 1937 headquarters on Confederate Ave. (now United Ave.), which was last renovated in 1957. While no one will argue with updating institutional infrastructure when it's due, it’s hard to ignore the timing of this $55 million investment at the same time as the city council's approval of a $90 million public safety training center just a stone’s throw away. DPS oversees the Georgia State Patrol (GSP), Capitol Police, and the Motor Carrier Compliance Division (MCCD). The first Georgia Police Academy was also dedicated at this location in 1966, and the GBI also once operated from here before relocating to a former federal honor farm tract of land in the 1980s. Also, the Atlanta Police Pistol Range has been located on Key Road since the late 1940s, and the Atlanta Police Academy used to be located on Key Road until 1992.
- There are still a significant number of active detention centers and correctional facilities in this immediate area, such as the Metro Transitional Center, Metro Reentry Facility, the Helms Facility, and the Metro Regional Youth Detention Center (RYDC) near Blackhall Studios, all on Constitution Road. With the current effort to close Atlanta’s Pre-Trial Detention Center, initiated by Mayor Bottoms in 2019, the threat looms that the city might return to old ways and use the former city prison farm for a detention center (to be added after the Public Safety Training Center). And, of course, the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary—The Big A—which opened in 1902 (much of it constructed of Stone Mountain granite), still commands that section but is currently nearly vacant amidst a corruption investigation (other Georgia prisons are being probed right now, too).
- A majority of the tracts of land currently swirling in multiple debates over current, simultaneous development projects on this end of Moreland Avenue — the former Atlanta Prison Farm, Blackhall Studios, Entrenchment Creek Park, The Quarry, Alliance Residential, among others — are situated on lands that once comprised a sizable chunk of Atlanta’s law-enforcement/prison-industrial-complex or were previously owned by the Southern Railroad.
- This is a sorely neglected industrial section of Southeast Dekalb County dotted with landfills, around which snake the endangered South River through a high-traffic corridor that’s low on human services, and has a poor historic track record of archaeological preservation (eg. the destruction of large sections of Native American sites along Soapstone Ridge in favor of big DOT and waste management projects).
Atlanta Prison Farm
Until recently, I wasn’t very familiar with a detailed history of the original city stockade on Glenwood Ave. or the old city prison farm on Key Road. In fact, like many, I was tempted to conflate the city prison farm with the nearly contiguous former U.S. Honor Farm that was affiliated with the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on nearby McDonough Road (the federal “honor farm” was actually divided into several separate, numbered farms). I mostly wanted to clearly distinguish the two prison farms that operated concurrently and to learn more about the human history of the original city stockade and subsequent city prison farm, so I sought out more information from a variety of sources, which include the Digital Library of Georgia, the Georgia Archives, the Special Collections Library at UGA, various newspaper articles, and more. For this particular post I will focus primarily on the Atlanta Prison Farm and the former U.S. Honor Farm, presented in a sort of timeline with linked articles and notes, which I will continue to add to here and there, but I will add a separate installment about the the original stockade later, since it preceded the city prison farm and many of the city's other jails and set the stage for public works historically performed by prisoners in the city—often on a conspicuous number of road projects contracted to Venable Brothers Construction Company in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century (you knew I was going to find more than a few connections to Stone Mountain). In fact, the Venable Brothers Construction Company made a few headlines of their own during the major scandal at the notorious Atlanta Stockade in 1909-1910, in connection with their cozy relationship with the city's Construction Department — and with the city council overall. Both William and Samuel H. Venable were even police commissioners at different points in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century respectively, and William Venable was also "streets commissioner" at one point. Like its former contemporary, Fulton Tower on Butler St. (built of so much Stone Mountain granite in 1897 that it was called “Big Rock”), these jails were brutal, inhumane places. And full of human stories.
After the major shakeup at the city stockade, Atlanta slowly began shifting stockade operations (eg. stables, blacksmithing, a farm, the city quarry, and even an incinerator) over to where the municipal dairy farm already was and/or to other "shops" around the city. By 1925, most of the prisoners had been moved out of the stockade building into barracks on the prison farm and then placed elsewhere in the city to perform public work based on race, gender, and physical and mental fitness. At that time, the city built a jail at Fort St. and Decatur St. that was exclusively for the Black male prisoners, which again built the jail themselves. But the primary penal outpost that really took off after the Atlanta Stockade closed for good became the City Dairy Farm on the outskirts of the city limits (city leaders liked that the prisoners wouldn’t be seen). The Black male inmates at Fort Street wouldn't move to the prison farm until 1939. But the big move to the prison farm model was first set off in order to build Girls High School, and mostly to capitalize on residential and commercial development in growing East Atlanta, Ormewood Park, Grant Park, and surrounding the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills (eg. the 77-acre James L. Key Golf Course on former stockade land was one such development in the early 1920s as was the White City amusement park). And since the 1920s, until its closure and liquidation in 1990, the city prison farm was often fraught with overcrowding, human suffering, racial inequality, and inhumane exploitation of those incarcerated there at a time when human rights and environmental protection were hardly on anyone's mind, much less mandated. From its early days until its closure, it figured in graft probes and corruption scandals by city politicians and sometimes even prison and police officials.
Longtime prison farm superintendent H.H. Gibson, whose main area of expertise was livestock, retired in 1962 after twenty-four years, and before him were superintendents J.C. Ellis and Tom C. Morris, who were all at different times caught up in probes of the prison farm. In 1965, the first of three Atlanta Police officers took charge of the city prison farm: (Capt. Ralph Hulsey (1965-1968), Capt. R.F. Jordan (1969-1971), and Lt. J.D. Hudson (1971-1990). Prisoner strikes grew more frequent by the1960s and greatly disrupted the the city’s labor supply for “public works” projects through the equally anodyne sounding “Construction Department.” One such strike occurred in 1968 and was still underway mere days before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination the day after he addressed sanitation strikers in Memphis. At that time, prison farm inmates brought lawsuits against APD Police Chief Herbert Jenkins and Capt. R.F. Jordan, who was now in charge of the prison farm while Capt. Hulsey took over the “Sanitary Division” of the Public Works Department.
Of course there were also helpers and advocates and some "feel-good stories" that came out of the prison farm through the years. Student and religious groups regularly performed outreach, and the ACLU got involved on numerous occasions to help inmates, and sometimes real social work and rehabilitation probably happened, but I still can't take my mind off of Margaret Brooks trying to commit suicide six times at the prison farm in 1934 or the image in 1949 of Black female inmates spreading chemical sludge from the wastewater treatment facility near the premises back into the soil. In recent decades, the old prison farm has often been used as a convenient dump site by the city, whether for the remaining stones from Atlanta’s original Carnegie Library (see videos below), for buried beloved zoo animals from the long gone Grant Park Zoo, such as elephants Coca and Maude, and gorilla Willie B. I, or for large rusted drums containing god only knows what, and more was probably stashed there. But I think you will find a wide variety of history when you explore the linked articles in the below timeline (most are from the Atlanta Constitution unless otherwise noted), which is by no means comprehensive. Thankfully, in so many ways, we have made a lot of progress since what's recounted in these news accounts, and yet, there will always be many more miles to go, especially when those in power threaten to repeat history.
1930 — 
1931 — Federal Honor Farm
U.S. Honor Farm operated from 1917 to 1965 and began around the same time that Atlanta began setting in motion its City Prison Farm. WWI had had just begun, and the federal government had reportedly purchased these honor farm tracts affiliated with the nearby Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for possible use as a POW camp, but Fort Gordon and Fort McPherson ended up being used for this purpose during the war, and so the honor farm started, which was actually becoming a trend at other prisons across the county. Around this time it wouldn't have been uncommon to see city prisoners wearing shirts stamped with the letters “CP,” while POWs’ shirts read “PW.” The below timeline of articles (most are from the Atlanta Constitution unless otherwise noted), often with fascinating old photos or drawings, will help fill in the history.
Carnegie Stones
Some of the abandoned stones from Atlanta's original downtown Carnegie Library were "stored" on the grounds of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. It awakened such mystery and poetry when I first came upon them strewn about the woods in December 2019 and again in April 2020. Other stones from the old Carnegie Library were used to create a Carnegie Monument (officially the Carnegie Education Pavilion) at Hardy Ivy Park in Downtown Atlanta in the late 1990s.
