Folsom State Prison just happened to be a slight detour on our path back to Sacramento Airport. Wanting to continue Lori's Johnny Cash history lesson, begun by James Garner's Tribute to Johnny Cash on Wednesday night, we stopped at the Big House Prison Museum to learn more.

Folsom State Prison (FSP) was opened in 1880 and is the state's second-oldest prison, after San Quentin. Interestingly, it was the first in the United States to have electricity. Folsom was also one of the first maximum security prisons, and has been the execution location of 93 condemned prisoners over a 42-year period. Oh yeah, a lot of stuff happened here.
Folsom is probably best known in popular culture for concerts performed at the facility by Johnny Cash, particularly in 1968, when the two shows of January 13 were made into a live album. He had written and recorded the song "Folsom Prison Blues" over a decade earlier.
The museum helped us discover the reason for Johnny Cash's "Blues".  We also learned how the prison was fashioned from gray granite from the surrounding rock quarries.  The museum features a wealth of photographs, old hemp ropes used to hang prisoners, memorabilia from Johnny Cash's famed concert shows, a hand-cranked Gatling gun, guard uniforms and many inmate manufactured weapons. Wild, inventive stuff.



The exhibits include an amazing eight-foot motorized Ferris wheel (c. 1940) created by prisoner William Jennings-Bryan Burke, made of a quarter million toothpicks and begun during one of his many stints at Folsom. Some people had a lot of time on their hands.

Construction of the facility began in 1878, on the site of the Stony Bar mining camp along the American River. The prison officially opened in 1880, with a capacity of 1,800 inmates. Prisoners spent most of their time in the dark, behind solid boiler plate doors in stone cells measuring 4 by 8 ft with 6-inch eye slots. Air holes weren't drilled into the cell doors until the 1940s, and those same cell doors are still in use today. Hard time indeed!


We had to send Steve's mom a postcard from here with the mailing address being Represa, CA 95671. Represa (translated as "dam" from the Spanish language) is the name given in 1892 to the State Prison post office because of its proximity to a dam on the American River that was under construction at the time. I would have thought the name was derived from the word repressed: adjective meaning restrained, inhibited, or oppressed. Hmm.
We began our museum tour by watching Huell Howser's Caifornia's Gold show in which he toured Folsom Prison. The history lessons we learned were incredibly interesting and this little museum is worth an explore. Great end to a great week.