April 5, 2014 (by Bill Moore)

Today, I drove to Normangee in Leon County to visit with Nelda Pierson and Pat Martin about the old calaboose that used to be in their town.  I learned that it consisted of a metal cage or cell block inside a brick building.  I suspect these cages were expensive because they had to be ordered from a company who made them unless some local had the skill to do it.  The metal cages in Crawford and Montgomery were both very well made by the  Pauly Jail Building Company of St. Louis, Missouri, a firm that is still in business.  What I was able to learn about the Normangee calaboose is that it was about 100 square feet in size and that the cage filled up most of the building.  Nelda was born in 1923 and remembers seeing prisoners in it when she was very young and it was still there when she went off to college in Waco in 1940.  Pat is the former newspaper editor and he once tried to get the town to preserve the cage and move it to their city park where there it could be seen by others along with a few small wooden cabins.  Tonight, I plan to enter more data and Rhonda may come over and help with some of the technical questions I have.

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