Yuma Territorial Prison (Yuma, AZ)

I’m still behind in my postings… have a few more days to get you caught up on:

On Saturday we visited the Yuma Territorial prison.  Click on this link for more information about this attraction.  And here’s another good link that has interesting stories about some of the notable inmates.

We jumped in the Silverado with our little dog Coach and arrived by 10 AM to meet up with Lloyd  DeGerald, (the Aqua-Hot Service Rep), as previously planned.  I mentioned in a previous post here, that I would meet up with Lloyd and his wife to return the special tools that he lent me to fix the Aqua-Hot last Thursday, and we would tour the prison together.  As it turned out – the prison tour doesn’t allow pets, which unfortunately, is the case with almost all federal or state run parks or attractions.

Lloyd and his wife also had their little dog with them, so Lloyd’s wife volunteered to stay with the vehicles and watch the pets while we went ahead and took the tour.  That was nice of her.

Here’s a pic of the sign at the parking lot entrance that I swiped from Google images.  Click here to see some other more professional images.

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And here’s some pics of our tour taken with our iPhones.

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The sally port (entrance gate) to the prison.
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View inside the courtyard after paying entrance fee. The Yuma coast-to-coast bridge in background.
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Water tower with guard tower built on top.

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Here’s what the main museum building looked like inside.

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A well made diorama of the prison as it looked back in it’s heyday was on display.

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Diorama of the Hell Hole.

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Can you imagine being packed in these 6 person cells?

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Hmmm… there could be a snappy caption for the photo below… but I better leave it alone 🙂IMG_6236

Here’s the archway leading to the cells.

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We almost had the courtyard all to ourselves… I wonder if any of the prisoners ever experienced that?

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We posed for a “selfie” in front of a portion of the old cells.

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After our tour of the prison, we got back to the parking lot to relieve Lloyd’s wife from her dog-sitting duties.  We were able to walk the dogs outside the prison walls and tour the prison cemetery.

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Yuma Territorial Prison Cemetery with the prison in the background. Guard tower on top of the water tank is on the right.

Once we had seen all there was to see in the immediate area, we piled back into our respective vehicles and headed over to see a locomotive that is on display a few blocks away from the prison.

We had to compete with a wedding photographer for pics of the 1907 steam locomotive.  Click here for more images of this locomotive.

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After checking out the nicely restored locomotive, we said our goodbye’s to our new friends and parted ways.  We drove through the historic downtown area but didn’t find anything that peaked our interest.  So, we hit a fast food restaurant that shall remain unnamed and went back to our Coach for a quiet evening.

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It was another good day.  I would highly recommend this tour to anyone visiting the area… definitely worth seeing.

Stay tuned for our day trip to the Imperial Sand Dunes in CA that we did on Sunday…