Anna .....

Maria Island City Jail -
Florida USA

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City Jail
“We built the jail in 1927”, Mitch Davis told a group of Islanders.
It was July 1964 and he was 80 years old.
Elected in 1923, he had served 54 months as the first mayor of Anna Maria City and he was a resident of the city from 1908 until his death in 1970.
The jail he refers to had thick walls made of tabby (blocks made of shell mixed with mud).
There were toilets, a washbasin and septic tank, which the city got free from Fort Dade on Egmont Key.
The front room was used as a city office.

“The need for a jail arose because there was a tavern and dance hall where the Sandbar [restaurant] stands now. Those who frequented the hall would get drunk and cause such disturbance with fights and more serious offenses. We were compelled to have some place to put them to cool off.

Most of the offenses were just plain drunkenness, disturbing the peace, and threatening life and limb as the liquor robbed them of their senses. There were no really serious crimes. I do remember, on one occasion, a Federal revenue agency brought us some rum runners they caught and asked us to hold them in the jail, which we did.

The jail proved to be the best preventative of trouble. After we put a dozen or more offenders behind bars, most of the violations stopped. Spending a night in the open air being bitten by thousands of mosquitoes, they made sure they did not land in jail again. To be sure nobody could tunnel their way out of the jail, I put three feet of concrete underneath the floor.”

During the Depression years, when drinkers and speeders ran out of “gas”, there was no longer a need for the jail. In the 1940s, the jail went up in smoke during a strong windstorm and no fire equipment was available. Harry Varley, founder of the Islander in the 1950s, had an idea of using the burnt-out building as a tourist attraction. He convinced the city commission to let it stand and publicized it in his paper.

Reproductions of the jail have appeared in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not columns and many newspapers and magazines. Hundreds of postcards featuring the jail have been mailed across the country. The landmark is still a favorite spot for photographers.

The Early Days - C. Norwood "

all info above taken from the AMIHS website below


www.AMIHS.org