The only couple ever married at the jail

On the twenty-first of October, 1880, Sabra Stacy was married in the LaGrange County jail. Her father was the sheriff and the sheriff's house was one half of the building. Neither county history mentions it.

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The county's first jail was made of logs and everyone knew it would not hold anybody.

It had iron-barred doors and windows, and then, for security, a high board fence built around the cell windows. The 1882 county history calls it a picturesque, though not a very secure, abode for the misdoers of the county.

It was used for thirty years, and towards the end of that the county stopped putting anyone important in it.

This primitive house of refuge was used for thirty years, although toward the last, prisoners of any importance were taken to other counties, and the jail became also, on account of its unhealthfulness, no longer tenable.

Not secure, and by the end not healthy either.

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So in 1872 the commissioners ordered a new one, and the 1882 history describes it the way you would describe a house you were proud of.

An architect from Grand Rapids named W. H. Croker. The contract to Brace and Reed of Kendallville in March. Boulder stone foundations, brick walls above, and the outside face of white pressed brick brought from Grand Rapids. The sheriff's residence two storeys, the jail part one storey above a basement. It was occupied in February of 1873.

The jail part is well cased inside with iron, and so constructed as to make escape for prisoners about impossible. The first cost of the building was about $29,000.

Six hundred dollars more went into drainage afterwards. In another chapter the same book puts the cost at twenty-eight thousand and adds that it was enclosed by a substantial iron fence.

The engraving above it shows that fence, and the windmill on the jail lot that also watered the court house next door.

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And then, in that same chapter, it says the building did not work.

…though, like all places for the security of prisoners, there have been occasions when it has proved insecure, notably in the escape, just previous to this writing, of one Miles, who was confined for bigamy, but was recaptured and received his just deserts by a sentence of three years in the penitentiary.

Miles is not the only one. Stephen Jenks, sentenced to life for the murder of a merchant at Ontario, escaped from that jail in 1872 and was not found for five years, working in a Michigan village near Saginaw.

Two escapes from a building constructed so as to make escape about impossible, and the book that made the claim records both.

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Thirty-eight years later the county was written up again, and the jail had improved.

Ford's history of 1920 gives the same building, the same contractors, the same month, the same twenty-nine thousand dollars. Then it adds an address and a compliment.

It stands on the north side of West Spring Street and is a handsome piece of property, and would not be taken for a jail by a stranger passing by it, but picked out rather, as a beautiful residence.

And it says the iron casing makes it next to impossible for a prisoner to make his escape.

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What is missing from that account is everything that would argue with it.

The architect is gone. The boulder foundations and the Grand Rapids brick are gone. The two storeys against one are gone.

Miles is gone, and so is the sentence admitting the building had proved insecure.

And the old log jail is still picturesque in 1920, and still not quite safe, since Ford softens not a very secure to none too safe. But it is no longer unhealthy. That clause is simply not there. The reason Battey gives for abandoning the building has been removed from the account of abandoning it.

The boast was not made by adding praise. It was made by leaving things out.

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Here is what both books say about the people inside.

Four prisoners are named in ninety years of county history. Jenks, who escaped. Miles, who escaped. Hiram Springer, from a killing in Clay Township. And Chauncey Barnes, who shot a schoolteacher at Stone Lake and then shot himself, and who was carried to this jail and, the book says, for some time was at the point of death, but finally recovered.

That is the only sentence in any source about the physical state of anybody held there.

When the vigilance companies made their arrests in January of 1858, the old jail was crowded to its utmost with prisoners and seven men went to the penitentiary at a single term of court. Not one of the seven is named.

Nothing anywhere describes the food, the discipline, the visitors, the work or the sanitation. The nearest thing to a word about conditions is the six hundred dollars spent on drainage.

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The sheriff and his family lived in the other half of it.

Both histories say so and neither says anything more. Battey gives the residence two storeys. Ford gives it a clause: the sheriff's residence forms a part of the structure.

Nelson Stacy was sheriff from 1876 to 1880, so he was in that house with his family for four years. He had come to the county in 1850 from Clark County, Ohio.

And in October of 1880, in the last weeks of his term, his daughter was married.

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The only place this is recorded is a subscription atlas, in a paid biographical column about a farmer in Bloomfield Township.

He was married Oct. 21, 1880, to Sabra A. Stacy, daughter of Nelson N. Stacy, ex-sheriff of LaGrange county, and they were the only couple ever married at the LaGrange jail, they being married while Mr. Stacy was in office.

Ford's second volume carries the same marriage. Same day, same couple, same father, and no mention of where.

Both county histories describe that building down to the source of its brick. Neither of them records the one thing anybody did in it that was not a crime, and the reason we have it at all is that a man in Bloomfield Township paid to have his life written up.