Goochland's Jail

By the 1820s, localities began replacing old jails with larger, more secure masonry buildings, and Goochland followed this trend with a jail built about 1825. The structure survived being burned three times, twice by prisoners and once by Union troops in 1865, and it continued serving the county into the 1920s. In early March 1865, part of Gen. Phillip Sheridan's Union army camped at Columbia, about 2 miles west of Goochland Courthouse, and spent several days destroying locks, boats, crops, livestock, and buildings along the Kanawha Canal. On the morning of March 11, a brigade of Union cavalry marched from Columbia toward Goochland Courthouse to destroy government property, but was intercepted by a squadron of the Seventh South Carolina Cavalry, Confederate Army. In the skirmish that followed, the Seventh South Carolina was routed by a squadron of the Union cavalry's Ninth New York, and the Union cavalry then went on to the courthouse, where they burned the jail in which Union soldiers had been imprisoned. Local magistrates had authority to establish prison bounds, an area where some prisoners, especially debtors, could move freely during the day, and Goochland's prison bounds for an earlier jail formed an inverted V that gave access to taverns and at least one shop. Although the state did not require executions to be concealed until 1862, by 1847 Goochland had moved its gallows from the public square to a place out of public view within the wall surrounding the jail. In 2016, archaeologists uncovered what is believed to be the base of that high brick wall, and a line of bricks set into the ground marks its location.

Goochland, Virginia · United States