The 1906 Pickens County jail replaced an older rock jail behind the courthouse, which had itself replaced the first county jail, a two-story log building. Dr. William B. Tate urged its construction as a grand juror and on two Citizens Committees. The architects were J.W. Coluke and Co., the contractors were William L. Landrum and son, and the steel work was installed by the Pauly Jail Co. of St. Louis, Mo., specifically by Luthor Cartwright, who married while there and eventually settled in Jasper, later supervising construction of the pink marble mansion in Tate. Lee W. Prather, a local stone worker, completed the front of the jail using marble from the Delaware Quarry at nearby Marble Hill, a quarry opened about 1840 by pioneer marble entrepreneur Henry Fitzsimmons. The jail still has a non-functioning gallows, though no one was ever executed on it. Its most regular residents were the sheriffs and their families, who lived there rent free. A federal court order closed the jail in 1980, and the well at the rear, now filled in, once supplied water for the hundreds of people who came to Jasper for singing conventions.