"Attend all ye villains that live in the state,
Consider the walls that encircle Newgate."
Newgate is the name of a famous prison in London. It is called
"Newgate" because it was first built, centuries ago, over a new
gate in the wall of the city. Later, when these rooms over the
gate became too crowded, a larger prison was built near by and
called by the same name.
There was once a Newgate prison in Connecticut. It was named for
the old English one, but, instead of being up over a gate, it was
down underground in a copper-mine. There was no entrance to it
except by a shaft thirty feet deep, and the colonists chose this
place for its security, yet the history of Newgate in Connecticut
is full of tales of the daring and successful escapes of its
prisoners.
Copper Hill, where the prison was, is in what used to be the town
of Simsbury, but is now East Granby. The copper-mines there were
opened early in 1700, and were worked for about sixty years. The
copper is said to have been of good quality. In 1737-39, coins
were made from it--some say by Dr. Samuel Higley who owned a mine
near his home. These coins were never a legal tender, but were
used as "token money," because small change was scarce in the
colonies. They are valuable to-day because they are very rare.
Granby coppers have on one side a deer standing, and below him a
hand, a star, and III, and around him the legend, "Value me as
you please." On the other side are three sledgehammers with the
royal crown on each hammer, and around them either the word
"Connecticut," or the legend, "I am a good copper," with the date
1737. A third kind has one broadaxe and the legend, "I cut my way
through." There is a specimen of each of the three kinds of
Granby coppers in the Connecticut State Library at Hartford.
The mines were quite successful at first, but, as the colonists
were not allowed to smelt and refine the ore in America, they
were obliged to send it all the way to England, and this was very
expensive. Sometimes, too, the ships carrying copper did not
reach England at all. One was wrecked in the English Channel and
another was seized by the French during a war with England. So in
1773, a few years before our Revolutionary War, the mines were
given up and the largest of them was changed into a prison.
At first there were no buildings at all. There was nothing but a
hole in the ground, closed by an iron trapdoor that opened into
the shaft, where a wooden ladder was fixed to the rock at one
side. At the bottom of the ladder there was a flight of rough
stone steps leading farther down into the mine. All was dark and
still except for the dripping of water along the galleries that
led away into the heart of the hill. One cavern was blasted out
to make more room and was fitted with wooden cells and bunks for
the prisoners to sleep in, and at night a guard was set to watch
the entrance up above and prevent any one from climbing the
ladder and getting out. When everything was ready, the committee
in charge of the work reported that it would be "next to
impossible for any one to escape from this prison."
The first prisoner sent there was a man named John Henson, who
was committed on December 22, 1773. He spent eighteen days alone
in the mine; then, on the night of January 9, 1774, he disappeared.
No one could imagine how he got out. But there was another shaft
leading up from the mine, a very deep one, where the copper ore had
been drawn out. It had no ladder in it and its opening had not been
closed, because it did not seem possible for a prisoner to escape
that way. Yet a woman drew John Henson up eighty feet through the
shaft in a bucket used for hoisting copper. After that, this shaft,
too, was carefully closed and a strong wooden guardhouse was built
over the entrance to the other one.
[Illustration: THE RUINS OF NEWGATE PRISON]
More prisoners were soon committed to Newgate. "Burglars,
horse-thieves, and counterfeiters," according to the law, were sent
there and they were set to work mining copper, but instead of
doing this, they dug their way out with the mining tools; so
workshops were built aboveground where they made nails, boots and
shoes, wagons, and other things. They slept in the mine as
before, but at daylight they were called and came up the ladder
in squads of three at a time under a guard, climbing as well as
they could with fetters on their legs. They took their meals in
the workshops and were chained to the forges and workbenches
until late in the afternoon, when they went down again into the
mine for the night.
When the Revolutionary War began, in 1775, political prisoners
were sent to Newgate in Connecticut, just as such prisoners had
often been sent to old Newgate in England. These men in America
were the Tories, or Loyalists, who sympathized with the British
and were often found giving them information and help. To protect
themselves the Americans arrested them. Some of the first were
sent by Washington from the camp at Cambridgik where the American
army was besieging Boston.
Here is a part of his letter to the Committee of Safety at
Simsbury; its date shows that it was written several months
before the Declaration of Independence by the Continental
Congress in Philadelphia:--
CAMBRIDGE, December 7th, 1775.