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Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary’s brutal history

Sinister 137-year-old state penitentiary morphs into mesmerizing tourist site



This is guard tower Number Two, one of five gun towers perched around the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary’s walls. During Brushy’s heyday, each tower was staffed 24 hours a day. KEN BECK

PETROS, Tenn. — If you ever spent time in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, you know it’s a hard place to forget.

I entered the State of Tennessee’s first maximum-security prison 26 years ago, and when I heard the steel trap-gates clank shut behind me, I have to confess it was an uneasy feeling to be slipping into a community of 596 felons who were branded “the worst of the worst.” Fortunately, my stay was but three hours long.

Today, what was the state’s oldest operating prison (R.I.P., January 1896-June 11, 2009) has its doors open to all for the price of admission as it transformed into a flourishing tourist attraction in 2018.

Located north of Petros (population 459) in a horseshoe-shaped cavity below Frozen Head Mountain (elevation 3,324 feet) in Morgan County, this castle-like fortress held hordes of killers, sexual predators and other vicious criminals.  

The prison is hemmed in on three sides by miles and miles of wilderness, steep mountains, rugged bluffs and woods crawling with copperhead and rattlesnakes as well as wild boars and bears. The plot of land was selected because of the rich coal veins in nearby mines.

What do the curious find when they explore the buildings and grounds of this notorious penal institution?

“Some things that will really surprise people about what prison life is really like compared to what they see in movies and television and a lot of very interesting history and interesting stories,” answered Debbie Wilkie Williams, who served in a variety of roles here from 1980 until 2010 and helped track down its history during its 100th anniversary in 1996.

Morgan County native Williams, who shared that locals refer to the prison simply as “Brushy,” began her career here when she was 22, following in the footsteps of her father, uncle and grandfather.

“The first job I had at the time, we called it a guard. Now we call it a correctional officer. I was one of the first women hired here. Later I worked in the count room where you are responsible for knowing where the prisoners are at all times. You coordinated all their movements and are the one responsible for making sure everybody is accounted for. I am just a volunteer now and talk to people in the museum,” said Williams.

Explaining more details as to why the prison was established at this site, Williams said, “This came about as a result of the Coal Creek Wars. The state was leasing out convicts to various coal companies, and we had five or six coal camps here in East Tennessee. They were taking jobs away from local miners, and their families were starving. So the miners got a vigilante group and freed the prisoners, put them on a train and sent them to Nashville and burned down the camps. Nashville was not able to handle all the convicts, so the state decided to build a prison here.”

Over its 113-year history as a containment center to keep the most dangerous criminals separated from the public, Brushy did its job exceedingly well. Every inmate that went over the walls, including James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., was captured quickly and tossed back into the slammer.

The unforgiving walls

The pen was a cruel and murderous colony, and hundreds of prisoners died here, many due to inmate-on-inmate violence.

On my initial visit to Brushy Mountain State Prison, I visited with Horace Beene, now deceased, who was an employee from the late 1930s until 1980. He told me that Brushy had been “the life of Petros” because it provided so many jobs in the community. Four generations of his family worked there including his grandfathers, his father and three of his sons.

“It was a real rough prison at that time. When I was dog boy (handling the bloodhounds for tracking escapees) in the ’30s, we were working four or five hundred in the mines and wouldn’t be a week go by they’d be one killed in the mines. They’d put ’em in a place like a rock fell on ’em, but they’d put a knife to ’em. There was fights going on all the time,” Beene said.

A multitude of the problems at Brushy Mountain in its formative years resulted from overcrowding. By 1931, the L-shaped wooden stockade, built in 1886 to hold 700 men, overflowed with nearly 1,000 prisoners. Due to its primitive conditions, the prison earned a notorious reputation around the world.

Bishop James M. Maxon, who served as the fourth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee from 1935 to 1947, crusaded for a better environment and after a fire destroyed the stockade, the state built a new main building in 1934 with a look similar to that of a Norman castle.

One of the dominant features at Brushy is the 18-to-22-foot-high rock wall that surrounds the 12-acre yard. It was created from rocks hand-quarried by prisoners. Five gun towers sit along the wall and at one time they were staffed 24 hours a day. Natural rock bluffs stretch several hundred feet straight up and make up a portion of the north wall.

The newer “big house” rises four stories high and holds A and B blocks, where inmates were segregated until the 1960s. Behind the main prison and D block, the high-security annex built in 1989 nicknamed “The Tombs” is slowly crumbling.

When I walked into this literal hell hole in 1997, it was home not so sweet home to 96 inmates in single cells where they were locked up 23 hours a day and received their meals through “pie holes” in the steel doors. Each door held a small window, and as I was walking around, I spied dozens of the residents peeping through those tiny windows. I suspect they may have been wondering if I might be the new kid on the block.

During part of my tour I chatted with a prisoner who was scrubbing the floor and seemed to be a right friendly fellow. I noticed he wore shackles on his legs. My host later told me, “That guy has killed three men while he’s been in here.”

During my half-day at Brushy I was able to survey dozens of the prisoners enjoying their one-hour-a-day break in an open outdoor area known as the lower yard. Here some were making phone calls on about a dozen pay phones along the wall of the chapel. This area also holds a concrete basketball court, a shuffleboard court and a reminder of Brushy’s brutal past, a whipping post.

On the north side of the lower yard stands an empty cut-stone gymnasium. When I was there the prisoners had access to a full-size basketball court, weightlifting equipment, a table-tennis table and a foosball table. 

On the east side of the lower yard stands another rock structure that was the laundry unit and also held the first Black shower house, which later was converted into the prison library that was filled with $2 million worth of law books, a recreation hall and Christ Chapel, which boasts a cross over its roof. I was told that more than 1,000 inmates were immersed in the chapel baptistry in the 1980s and 1990s.

Since 2018 much of this space has been filled with hundreds of artifacts and vintage photos that make up the Brushy Mountain museum. It’s a must-see if you visit and don’t skip the video which presents fascinating tales from former employees.

‘The Hole’ was a dark place

Beneath the chapel was an arts and crafts workshop and Brushy’s infamous Hole. The workshop is gone now but not “the Hole.”

Floyd Freytag, a warden here in the early 1950s, told me that this haunting relic of yesteryear “disturbed me a whole lot. You couldn’t realize what it would do to a person unless you seen him come out of there.”

From the early 1930s through the early 1960s, rowdy inmates or those who could not meet their coal tonnage quota from the mines were punished in the Hole. There are actually four separate holes. These dark and dingy, eight-by-four-square-foot rooms held only a straw mattress and two buckets: one for fresh water and the other for a toilet. A prisoner could be stuck in here for up to 15 days and fed nothing but bread and water. Because no light entered the cell, many of them were temporarily blind after being freed.

Williams said that when she stands beside the Hole it fills her with sadness and regret. “It really makes me sad to think that we treated other human beings like that. I don’t believe anyone deserves to be treated like that.”

The Big Escape

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary’s most famous inmate, James Earl Ray, and six other inmates kicked off the largest manhunt in Tennessee history on June 10, 1977, when they went over the back rock wall.

During my 1997 visit with prison warden Gil Monroe, he told me about the great escape, saying, “We got a call across the mountains. There were six of us on the team and we got on this hot track. This dog crossed the creek and went up the mountain, and we could hear brush breaking in front of us. We didn’t know who it was.

“Next thing we knew we came upon this guy laying down covered with leaves. I guess that was his last attempt to hide from us. We got kind of spooked since it was at night, and we didn’t know who might be with him. When we uncovered him it was James Earl Ray. He didn’t say a word. We just cuffed him and walked him out.”

When inmates broke out of Brushy, a steam whistle would toot once for each escapee, and bloodhounds and guards on horseback would track them down. Local men also could enlist in the search as there was a $25 reward for any prisoner returned.

Former Brushy Mountain prison employee and historian Debbie Wilkie Williams was around during Ray’s getaway and shared, “Everybody was talking about it. We just went about our normal daily activities. I remember being stopped at numerous checkpoints and having my car searched.

“Ray was captured after 54 hours. He got less than five miles from the prison because he became lost and ran in circles. Everybody was kind of relieved. The local people didn’t like all these outside people coming in and taking over. All these federal agents were down in Petros and Wartburg, and it was exciting, but they were ready to get them out of the way and get back into everyday life.”

Ex-inmate turns into tour guide

For Crossville’s George Wyatt, 64, Brushy Mountain was his everyday life from January 1984 until mid-1986. Now the ex-inmate serves as an affable tour guide.

“Back in ’83, I’m the one who blew up Hiawatha Country Club at Lake Tansi. It was a felony for using dynamite. I was dumb. I was 25. I got a 10-year sentence. I served two-and-a-half years because of good behavior and did five years on parole,” confessed Wyatt. “I tell a lot of young school kids, ‘This ain’t no place to be, and nothing to brag about at all.’ ”

Describing his time as an inmate, he said, “It was a nightmare. To this day I’m still looking over my back. We didn’t have gangs. We had cliques. The old convicts in there, they liked me. If they had any idea I’d been a security guard, they would have killed me on the spot.”

While in lockup he witnessed several vicious attacks. One of those was a man who was stabbed to death right before his eyes. As for how he reacted, he said, “See no evil, speak no evil.”

Wyatt, who can talk a mile a minute, has been a tour guide since the fall of 2018, said, “This is my therapy over all these years. They’ll tell you they created a monster. I won’t shut up. I go all day long. I can tell you things better than you can read these stories. I really enjoy this.”

Wyatt will lead tours Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays in June. He’s worth the price. As for the question he gets asked most? He said, “Why did you blow up the country club?” We’ll let him answer that when you get there.

Thirty-year Brushy veteran Williams shared more about the prison’s history noting that employees lived in homes outside the main gate from the 1930s until 2009, and in the mid-20th century prison staff would enjoy playing baseball games against the inmates on weekends while their families watched while feasting on picnic lunches.

“During the 1940s a lot of children were born up here. The prison doctor was the only physician in the community, and many of the free-world people were treated here by the physicians,” she added.

Prison shuttered in early ’70s

Williams disclosed that some of the guards were injured by inmates with homemade shanks (stabbing knives) and went on strike in mid-1972, which forced Gov. Winfield Dunn to close the penitentiary and ship inmates to other prisons. It remained shuttered until September 1975. When Brushy closed for good in 2009, there were 21 prisons across the state.

“Now there are 14 as the state closed the small prisons and built all the mega-prisons,” said Williams, noting that includes the Morgan County Correctional Complex in Wartburg, which holds an inmate population of about 2,500 and has 744 employees.

Now the 127-year-old Brushy prison is owned by the Morgan County Economic Development Board and operated by the Brushy Mountain Group.

“When we closed in 2009, we took everything we could from the museum (which opened in 1996) and artifacts in the prison and locked them all up in hopes that someday we could open the museum back up again,” recalled Williams. “I worked with the Department of Tourism and tried to sell the state on doing this, and they did not want to. As you know it took us 10 years. The first year we opened up there was no advertisement done and from April to October we sold over 40,000 tickets. There are people who come back four or five times and visit.”

Williams worked in the prison museum on summer weekends the first two years after the site opened to the public and said he was surprised at how many former inmates brought their families to show them their old stomping grounds.

“The inmates we all knew were those who kept coming again and again (being reincarcerated). Before that we never heard about the ones who got out and were successful. I was really humbled, and I believe it validated our profession that some went out and made a successful future for themselves,” said Williams.

“I remember one inmate who drove the fire truck here. When he came back to visit in he was real shy. He said, “I got my CDL license so I could drive a garbage truck first and then a fire truck for the state, and I became an over-the-road truck driver and made a good living.’”

Phantoms lurk behind Brushy walls

While Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary is a scary place even in daylight, for those who want to be spooked, visitors can book a paranormal tour or overnight investigation.

Williams warned, “If you come in and are a skeptic and spend a night at Brushy with an open mind, you will be a believer when you leave. People ask me a lot of times, ‘If it’s that haunted how come you didn’t know when it was a working prison?’ Well, there were things that happened when it was a working prison. When you were by yourself and heard a noise, you didn’t think about it, but now, when that jail door clinks by itself …

“I was walking across the yard with another employee, and we heard one of the cell doors clank slam in A Block and no one else was in the prison walls but us. Before I started working, we had talked, and my cohort Jackie and I were going to start working in the museum and a paranormal group came to do an investigation. When they came out next morning they asked Jamie, the paranormal tour director, ‘Do the names Debbie or Jackie mean anything to you? We got three different EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) in three different locations.’ ”

Country-bluegrass stars play here

On the brighter side, Williams reported that converting Brushy into a tourist destination has been a great success and a godsend for the economy of the county. One of the big hits has been concerts in the Yard.

“(Country music star) Jamie Johnson approached us the first year and has been here every year since doing concerts. We’ve also had Dwight Yoakam, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Sawyer Brown, Chase Rice, the Yonder Mountain String Band, Aaron Lewis, and we’ll have the Old Crow Medicine Show on June 3. Our first concert we sold over 4,500 tickets. We’ve built a concert stage behind the walls,” said Williams.

The former correctional officer shared a curious manifestation that she and other workers at the prison observed over the years which they refer to as “the clouds of doom over Brushy.”

“The employees used to joke all the time about the clouds of doom that set over the prison. You could drive in from Highway 116 up to the prison, and it would be nice and sunny and clear, and then there would be clouds set over the prison. The clouds sort of got stuck there because of being surrounded on three sides by the mountains,” said Williams.

The end of the line

The final end of the line for countless Brushy Mountain inmates was a cemetery less than a mile outside the prison walls. Many have been laid to rest here since 1896. Small stones used to mark their graves. However, no map was kept showing who was buried where, and over the years the rocks were disturbed by Mother Nature and as well as by men on tractors.

In 1986 the stones were collected and placed in a single memorial on Simmons Hill, now known as Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary Cemetery. Atop the rocky memorial a small wooden cross rises skyward. 

Williams has visited the graveyard on several occasions and reports there is no way to tell how many men were buried there.

“I have researched and found a little over 100 documented death certificates but am guessing that is a small drop in the bucket. A local guy claims it is over 400,” said the prison historian.

“It gives me a feeling of sadness. When I did research on the death certificates of some of the men buried there, I found they didn’t even know who their next kin was to notify. And I am sure many of their families never knew what happened to them.”

BRUSHY MOUNTAIN STATE PENITENTIARY TOUR

Hours: Open daily 10:30 a.m.-7 p.m. Eastern Time in June, July and August (site is closed December through March.)

Tickets: Self-guided tours: $20 adult; $15 child ages 7-12; $18 military and seniors (age 65); private guided group tours: $30 adult, $20 child; plus tax. Public overnight paranormal investigation: $150 per person, plus tax, ages 16 and older; eight to 12 in a group.

Location: From Nashville to Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary near Petros is about a 2½ hour drive. For details, go to tourbrushy.com or call (423) 324-TOUR.