Idaho State Historical Society

So it makes me think that maybe they didn't do it, but again, I have nothing to base that on other than my own opinion.

So, but that was something that I found and that's something I have submitted to the Idaho Historical Society.

So hopefully they will like actually put that and publish that and like give me recognition.

Yeah, maybe it'll be like Aaron's Mark.

We have merch available if you want a t-shirt, anything.

All of that goes to support the Idaho State Historical Society.

But with that, do your own time.

Do your own number.

Welcome back, folks, to another episode of the Behind Gray Walls podcast, a podcast about the old Idaho penitentiary and the men and women who lived and worked here.

My name's Anthony, and I am actually at the Idaho State Archives here with Samuel.

Hi, everybody.

And our Development and Membership Administrator, Seth Wheeler.

You know, a lot of that was due to the fact that, uh, you know, this was after, uh, one of the major riots that the site closed, and so a lot of things had been destroyed.

But the positive from that, uh, is that, you know, the site was essentially immediately turned over to the Idaho State Historical Society.

Uh, it never left the hands of the state, right? It just went to a different state agency.

And because of that, the site has all of the prison records located in our archives and then a lot of great artifacts, and a lot of that stuff is, is still here, um, from historic signage that gives us, uh, a really good idea of how the prisoners lived day to day and how, you know, how they were maneuvered around the site like, like traffic, [laughs] right? Or, uh, things that were left in cells.

...

in, in paranormal investigations and in, uh, in folks wanting to experience, quote, unquote, "abandoned places", right? As a staff, we obviously have a...

And being part of the Idaho State Historical Society, we have, you know, educa- an educational mission and a foundation in which we build our exhibits off of that we've used to really set ourselves apart from other historic prisons by being a site that humanizes our, the populace, the people who not only who lived here and worked here.

And so we're, um, we use the research th- and resources that we have available to us to tell the stories of the people that were incarcerated here and to allow people to use those fact-based narratives to build their own narrative of how the prison functioned and operated for 101 years.