In Brief
At the old federal courthouse in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Judge Isaac Parker sent dozens of men to the gallows out back. The building still stands — and a recorder left near his courtroom furniture later caught three bangs, like the hammering of a gavel.
The Full Story
There's a courthouse in Fort Smith, Arkansas where they used to hang people in the yard out back. Between 1875 and 1896, 79 men dropped through the trapdoor of its gallows. The judge who sent most of them there was Isaac Parker — the newspapers called him the Hanging Judge.
Parker said he hated the name. "I never hung a man," he told a reporter. "It is the law." But he kept the bench for 21 years, and from his courtroom window he could watch the men he sentenced drop.
Crowds came to watch, too. One hanging in 1896 drew so many people that a shed roof collapsed under the ones who'd climbed onto it.
The building still stands. You can walk through it today. The gallows behind it are a reconstruction now — six nooses on a single beam — and the story goes that on dead-still days, with nothing else moving, the ropes swing on their own.
The worse part of the place is underneath. Below the courtroom sat the jail, and it was bad enough that the people who toured it wrote it down. Two rooms, no windows above ground, no air. One summer they held more than a hundred men down there at once. A senator's daughter who visited called it "a veritable hell upon earth." The guards packed the ceiling with sawdust so the smell wouldn't reach the judge upstairs.
Parker is gone now, buried across town. But his courtroom furniture — the bench, the chairs — ended up in a museum nearby. One night, a group of investigators left a recorder running near it and walked out.
When they played the tape back, there were three sounds. Evenly spaced. Like something coming down on wood.
"It was the hammering of a gavel," the museum's director said.
