Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility

The oldest prison in Colorado sits on a hill at the edge of Cañon City. It opened in 1871, five years before the territory became a state, and the people who worked there called it Old Max. For most of a century it held a second job: until 1993, when death row moved to a newer penitentiary, this was the address where Colorado killed the men it condemned.

It did it first by hanging, on an upward-jerking gallows the staff called the twitch-up. The last hanging was in 1933. After that came a single-seat gas chamber, in use from 1937 to 1967. No exact tally of the executions survives in any source that holds up, but the chamber and the gallows ran for decades, and the dead nobody claimed were carried up the road to a plot in Greenwood Cemetery. Locals named it Woodpecker Hill, after the birds that pecked at the wooden grave-markers.

The bloodiest day came before any of that machinery did its worst. On October 4, 1929, an uprising the records call both a riot and an escape attempt left thirteen dead: eight guards and five prisoners. Fires gutted the dining room, the chapel, and the cell houses. By one regional account the ringleaders murdered a guard each hour through the night, though only one source tells it that way. Near 4 a.m. four of them killed themselves, and at sunrise the rest marched out and surrendered.

One grave on Woodpecker Hill belongs to Joe Arridy. He was intellectually disabled, wrongly convicted of a 1936 murder, and executed in the gas chamber on January 6, 1939. On death row he rolled a toy train the warden had given him between the cells. "He probably didn't even know he was about to die," the warden said, "all he did was happily sit and play with a toy train I had given him."

Colorado pardoned him in 2011. He had been dead seventy-two years.