The Rise and Ruin of Old Newgate — It Was a Copper Mine

In 1781, men were held seventy feet underground in a failed copper mine on a hillside at Simsbury, Connecticut. The shafts had been sunk through solid rock in 1707 to raise ore, and the galleries ran several hundred feet in different directions. When the mine failed, the colony bought the remaining lease and put prisoners in the holes for thirty-seven pounds, roughly ten thousand dollars today. There was one way in. A hatch in a kitchen floor, capped with iron, with a ladder under it. Food went down it, air went down it, and what light there was went down it and did not reach the bottom. Platforms of boards were built into the niches where the ore had been cut out, with straw on them. The rock held at about fifty degrees in every month of the year, two galleries stood in water, and pots of charcoal were kept burning to move the air. At daylight the hatch was opened and the men were called up three at a time, an order they gave as heave up. Among them were burglars and counterfeiters, Continental soldiers sentenced by court-martial, and Loyalists who could not be exchanged because the state had ruled they were not soldiers. On the night of May 18, 1781, the hatch was raised for a visitor and the prison was lost in the time it took to lift it. Built from prisoner accounts, colonial committee reports and the prison's own history.