Mills County, Iowa
Silver City Community History
1879 - 1979
JAIL
SILVER CITY JAIL
The new city Calaboose is about completed and Mayor Huffaker and Marshall Kurtz are looking for star boarder with which to dedicate the building. All that is necessary for you to do to get a little free board is to
load on “bug juice” and try to paint the town a brilliant red. (Silver City Times, June 1, 1911).
NEW JAIL DEDICATED
Silver City’s new cement jail, which was built last summer, has at last been duly dedicated, and henceforth and for ever more will be known as the “Miller House". This dedication took place Monday morning
when a young man named Miller was arrested and placed in durance vile for breaking into a freight car.
Young Miller claims Chicago as home and says he got into the car, in Omaha, with the hopes of stealing a ride to his home city. But in the car was a box of millinery goods belonging to a Miss Clara Plumb of Silver City.
Miller broke into the box and
decorated himself with a lot of millinery fixin’s that originally intended for members of the fair sex only. After being properly bedecked as he thought, Miller laid down on the floor and went to sleep.
The car came to Silver City,
Monday morning on the local freight, and when the train men opened it, they found Miller sound asleep. He was arrested and deposited in the new jail until Tuesday when a railroad detective arrived here and took charge of him.
On Wednesday Miller was taken before Justice of Peace, Frank Pullman. He confessed to petit larceny and gave him ten days in the county jail.
(Silver City Times, Nov. 30, 1911)
The summer of 1979 the old jail was painted and cleaned up for the town's 100 year celebration.
~submitted by Roseanna Zehner & Darlene Jacoby