Built in 1859 and used as the county jail until 1915, the Old Wilkes Jail is one of North Carolina's best-preserved examples of nineteenth-century penal architecture, retaining primitive security features such as a front door studded with nails an inch apart, original iron and wood cell doors, window bars, and primitive sanitary devices in the upstairs cells. Four rooms on the south side served as the jailor's living quarters, while four opposite rooms were used as cells, including at least one for female prisoners. Among its most infamous prisoners were Tom "Dooley" Dula, jailed after his 1867 arrest for the murder of Laura Foster until former Governor Zebulon B. Vance secured a change of venue to Statesville, and Otto Wood, an escape artist who reportedly had escaped from 10 prisons by the time he was shot and killed in 1930, but never escaped from this jail, where he had been imprisoned at age 13 for stealing a bicycle. Restored to its original form in the late 1960s by Old Wilkes, Inc., now Wilkes Heritage Museum, Inc., it opened as a historic site in the mid-1970s and is now part of the Wilkes Heritage Museum.