Boot Hill Cemetery IA
Iowa Men's Reformatory Cemetery, Anamosa Iowa
The two prison cemeteries at the Iowa Men's Reformatory contained those deceased prisoners whose bodies remained unclaimed by relatives and who were not transferred to the state medical colleges. Although it is known that the state placed the first cemetery on a hill top Somewhere at Farm No. 1 or Farm No. 5 west or north of the reformatory, its location remains unidentified. Here, head and foot stones marked the graves which were arranged side-by-side in rows. The state opened its first cemetery by 1876. Requiring the location for agricultural purposes, it moved the first prison cemetery, about thirty-five individuals, to its current location in 1914. By the time the state created its second cemetery, it had established the Iowa Men's Reformatory seven years before.
Symbolic resources such as the cemetery provide a better understanding of prevailing attitudes toward the prisoner during the 1870 to 1930 corrections period. The early mass burials and the stark stones of the later period suggest lack of individuality. Society had banished the prisoners from society, and they became therefore faceless entities. The reformatory program at the Iowa Men's Reformatory in the early nineteenth century corroborates this supposition. It was committed not to the punishment of the prisoners and not to their reform through individual penitence and hard labor. Instead, a single program was to reform all prisoners through the retraining of the moral, mental, and physical being. By the initiating act of 1907 and subsequent funding in 1913, the reformatory was to establish work which retrained work skills as well as work habits and moral and mental habits through undifferentiated programs. While it did establish state-use industries, the program failed to provide individual prisoners with the work skills needed for employment. It slowly improved its elementary education program. The reformatory attempted to improve self-discipline through military drill. Moral reform remained the duty of the chaplain.. This area of the reform program still appears to have remained tied to penitence and the conversion process. Guided by the grading system, discipline still relied on rigid rules. But, by the 1930s, recidivism still remained high. The reformatory program of the early twentieth century generally continued to include activities added to but not replacing the programs of the Auburn systems and brought only superficial behavior changes. The program did not address individual problems until the progressive era of prison reform in the 1940s.
The national prison reformatory program initiated in 1870 had failed to reform perhaps because the prevailing view of and resulting treatment of individual prisoners as social deviants and as society's outcasts had altered little since the initial Auburn penitentiary movement of the 1820s. Along with the belief that each criminal could undergo reform, the element of punishment in the Auburn system lingered in its program of hard labor through the end of the nineteenth century. Prisoners continued to lack individuality in the reformatory program which treated them alike whatever their past. Even before the 1920s, the and to find answers to the problem of prisoner reform in the individual rather than the mass analysis and treatment of prisoners. It sought to find the cause of criminality for each prisoner and prescribe individual treatment. However, few prisons including the Iowa Men's Reformatory adopted this program by the end of the 1930s. The cemetery stones at the prison cemetery reflect this faceless image of the prisoner.
Site Description
The Iowa Men's Reformatory Cemetery sits near the top of a hill overlooking the valley containing the Men's Reformatory in the City of Anamosa, Iowa. It lies 4500 feet to the east of the reformatory complex and 2000 feet to the northeast of Farm No. 1. It sits in the northeast quarter of the southeast quarter of section 4, township 84 north, range 4 west. Enclosing .92 acres, the boundaries of the cemetery and the district form a triangle running along County Trunk Highway E28 along the southeast leg. A barbed wire fence resting on wood posts separates the cemetery from the surrounding agricultural lands along the north and west legs. The cemetery stones are surrounded by cut grasses, scattered trees, and trimmed shrubs. Opened in 1914, the cemetery includes only the burials of prisoners from the reformatory. The cemetery is one of the associated properties commonly placed outside the penitentiary wall. Except for the addition of post-1942 gravestones, it has not experienced any known physical alterations.
The cemetery is composed of four rows of limestone gravestones running northwest-southeast along the hillside. However, the stones are not aligned one behind the other in the opposite, southwest-northeast direction. Four varieties of stones prevail. (1) Altogether containing about thirty-five individuals, the earliest variety is tall, about four and a half feet in height; rectangular in horizontal and vertical cross-section; narrow in width; and flat-topped. One additional stone related to them is tall, about six feet high; square in horizontal cross-section; and flat-topped. (2) Many of the stones are about three and a half feet tall and square in cross-section. They have a pyramid-shaped top resembling an intersecting gambrel roof. (3) A third variety is rectangular in horizontal cross-section and narrow in width. Their tops are rounded, and they stand about three and a half feet high. (4) Shaped like a rectangular box, the last variety is low to the ground, about half a foot high; rectangular in horizontal and vertical cross-section; and wider than it is taller. Identifying information occurs on the vertical faces of all stones except the fourth variety where it is written on the horizontal, top face.
Varieties 2 and 3 compose most of the cemetery. They mark single graves and range in age from 1914 to the 1940s. These stones note the name, age, date of death, and occasionally the prisoner's number. Variety 1, the tall stones, clusters in the last two rows of the rear in the northwest corner of the cemetery. They are mass graves containing as many as six to eight individuals. Their original burial dates begin as early as 1876. One grave many contain burials ranging, for example, from 1881 to 1889 and another from 1876 to 1891. These stones note the name and death date of each individual in the grave. Variety four clusters in the southeast corner of the yard and denotes the most recent burials which date primarily to the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. It displays the same information as varieties 2 and 3. None of the stones display designs or epitaphs in association with this identifying information.
Other than the inclusion of the post-1942 gravestones (variety 4) in the southeast corner, the cemetery has undergone no known alterations. Although post-dating 1942, these later stones represent the continued utilization of the prison cemetery.
Cemetery from CTH E28 looking east (1991)
