1910 Hidalgo County Jail

1910 Hidalgo County Jail

Hutson Gallagher prepared the nomination for the Museum of South Texas History. NPS approved P1 2-23-18

The 1910 Hidalgo County Jail is part of the Museum of South Texas History campus in downtown Edinburg across the courthouse square.

An integrated hyphen connects the jail with a two-story addition that houses the museum archives. the connection renders the two buildings a single resource for nomination purposes.

The 1976 Archive Addition is a 4700 sq foot windowless building connected to the jail’s north elevation. Exterior walls are stucco and painted white with stringcourses along the upper wall.

The Hidalgo County Jail, built in 1910, is a brick masonry Mission Revival-style building finished with a textured, white stucco. The two-story jail has a rectangular plan that features a projecting open-sided square tower on the southwest corner with a pyramidal roof sheathed in red clay tile.

The south half of the building has a flat roof and crenelated parapet. Raised stucco stringcourses at the roof line help unify the building’s exterior. The stucco is also used to express the window sills and the arched entrance.

All windows are wood double-hung mortise and tenon construction. Most of the current windows are replicas based on historic photographs, however some original window elements remain.

Restoration projects that began in the late-1960s returned the building to its original appearance.

The 1976 addition, however, altered the building’s north elevation fenestration and the previously exterior wall now faces the interior two-story hyphen.

First floor rooms were originally arranged for sheriff’s department use and jailer’s quarters but reconfigured to create a hallway that connects to the hyphen.

The second floor retains the original footprint with a large room that previously held a free-standing iron cell block, two small jail cells, and the “hanging room” in the tower.

An iron gallows door, staircase, and cell door are original to the jail and reflect its historic use.

The 1910 jail retains good architectural and historical integrity thanks to sensitive restoration projects. Although the archive addition is a sizable modern building, it is set back from the historic building and its plain wall surfaces do not detract from the original jail design.

In 1909, the Hidalgo County Seat moved to a new townsite now-called Edinburg.

Citizens approved a $75,000 bond to build a new county courthouse and jail.

Completed in 1910, the Hidalgo County jail functioned in that capacity for just 12 years when county commissioners called for a larger facility to replace it.

Between 1922 and 1964, the building was a civic center, City Hall, police station, and fire station and additions were made to the historic building to accommodate these various functions. In the late-1960s, local preservationists secured a permanent lease and began restoring the building to its original appearance. In 1970, the “Old Hidalgo County Jail” opened to the public as a museum.

The 1910 Hidalgo County Jail is an architecturally significant local example of an early 20th century Mission Revival civic building. Its design is attributed to noted Texas architects Henry T. Phelps and Atlee Ayres, who were then at the beginning of their long, successful careers.

The Jail, and its counterpart the 1909 Hidalgo County Courthouse (demolished), are two of the few known Mission Revival civic buildings constructed in Texas. Mission Revival originated in California in the 1880s as a style based loosely on that region’s early Spanish Colonial ecclesiastical and adobe residential architecture and was a popular style in South Texas between 1900 and 1920.

The nominated building is only one of two known jails built in that style in the state and is the only one that survives. Its expresses Mission Revival style in relatively few suggestive details: plain expanses stucco exterior walls, a three-story corner “bell” tower, arched entrance, and red clay tile roof.

The 1910 Hidalgo County Jail is nominated to the National Register of Historic Places at the local level of significance under Criterion A in the area of Government and Criterion C in the area of Architecture.

The jail no longer retains integrity from later periods of its civic use. Therefore, the period of significance is 1910-1922 which represents the years it functioned as a jail.