It’s going to cost millions of dollars to restore the old Missouri State Penitentiary that was hit hard by the May tornado. Some folks think it shouldn’t be repaired. Just tear it all down, they say.   There’s room to differ with that opinion—and we do. It is, after all, one of the distinguishing features of Jefferson City. In fact, it might be one reason there IS a Jefferson City.

In the early days of the city’s existence, the place was pretty crude and the legislature, which moved here in 1826 was reluctant to spend any money to make the town better. Governor John Miller suggested that building a state penitentiary here would stabilize the town, provide year-around employment (the legislature did not meet annually back then), and answer a statewide public need.

So the place was built, well outside of town at the time.

An exploration of A Hall, the oldest building at the pen, or the solitary confinement dungeon in the basement of another cell block is more than enough to understand why the place was considered “a bar to heaven, a door to hell,” as one long-ago inmate put it.

The old joint opened in 1836 on the outskirts of Jefferson City and closed in 2004, well within a residential area of the city.   A Hall dates to 1868 and looks it. The inmate’s comment to the contrary, the prison was once praised as one of the most efficient state lockups in the nation because it fed prisoners for an average cost of eleven cents a day. A few years later, a local newspaper called it “The greatest in the world.” Local pride aside, if it was the greatest, the middlin’ kind of pen must have been really awful.

By 1967, thirteen years after the worst riot in the prison’s history, it was called “The bloodiest 47 acres in America” by Time magazine.

Your correspondent was in the place from time to time to cover stories or play softball. Once of the times he was there was very late at night, on the top tier of cells in ancient A Hall, interviewing inmates about the order to integrate the cell blocks. “I don’t care who’s in the cell next to me. I just want to do my time and get out,” one inmate told me. “How much more time do you have?” I asked. “Thirty-five years,” he answered as calmly as you and I might say “Friday.”

Weasel-worders in 1991 changed its name from the Missouri State Penitentiary to the Jefferson City Correctional Center. One look at the walls and the cell blocks, and it was hard to buy the idea that it was anything but a penitentiary. A pen.   By 2004 it was called the Missouri State Penitentiary again. That September, however, all the inmates moved into a Jefferson City Correctional Center east of the city.

Since then the old prison has been an increasingly popular place for public tours. About 35,000 people have been going through it each year, some of them buying into the idea the place might have spooks in it and taking overnight visits. There have been no visits since the tornado, though.

But whether you go through it in broad daylight or whether you are looking for extra chills in the middle of the night, the place is still what an anonymous inmate wrote about it in 1917. At least he was anonymous when the Rocheport Progress printed his verse, called “Rightfully Named,”  on March 30.

A bar to heaven, a door to hell,

Whoever named it, named it well.

A bar to manliness and wealth

A door to want and broken health.

A bar to honor, pride and fame

A door to grief, sin and shame.

A bar to home, a bar to prayer,

A door to darkness and despair.

A bar to honor, useful life,

A door to brawling senseless strife.

A bar to all that’s true and brave,

A door to every patron’s grave.

A bar to joys that home imparts,

A door to tears and aching hearts.

A bar to heaven, a door to hell;

Whoever named it, named it well.

The newspaper commented the verse had been written “by a poor devil in the Missouri State Penitentiary who learned by bitter experience the truth he here expresses in rhyme.”

The old pen, battered by the May tornado, faces some uncertain times now. Damaged roofs, blown-out windows, and a blown-down wall segment are discouraging things to see. But we cannot lose this place that for so long was the “bar to heaven, a door to hell” for many who lived and died there.