The official histories of the Atlanta Prison Farm paint a rosy picture of “respect,” “trust,” “reform,” and “the dignity of work.” But digging deeper reveals a much darker history that the City has not yet reckoned with. And it’s about to be sold and bulldozed by the same government institutions who caused the untold suffering hidden under the site’s surface.
A proposed police and fire training facility on the site of the old Atlanta Prison Farm at 561 Key Road has raised concerns among citizens about environmental racism, police violence, and land stewardship in the era of climate change. But it also raises questions about the history of the Prison Farm itself. The most often-cited histories suggest that the land was the site of a federal prison farm that was later taken over by the city and soon abandoned.
But archival research into the Key Road site reveals that not only was it never run federally, it was run as a city prison farm uninterrupted from about 1920 to nearly 1990, and doing considerable harm to those it incarcerated throughout, despite claims of reform at every stage. Newspaper articles, letters from nurses, legislative and inspection records, and folk stories tell tales of overcrowding, “slave conditions,” lack of healthcare, labor strikes, deaths, and unmarked “pauper’s” graves.
And this barely scratches the surface. Throughout our research we were surprised in two conflicting directions: one, that there was so much available historical documentation that seemingly few had dug into and put together correctly; and two, that there was so much missing entirely — records that were missing, destroyed, misfiled, or possibly were never kept in the first place. We are a group of citizen researchers with very limited time and resources who pulled at one question and found hundreds more. This piece is meant to be a brief introduction, a survey of the possible directions for further research. We strongly believe that a full investigation into the history of this land and many of its current physical attributes is needed before any further development or leasing takes place. Kathryn Nichols already laid the groundwork for such research in her 2015 thesis on the unmarked graves and burial grounds of the Brandon Indian Residential School and the history of what took place during operation: a three-pronged approach including archival research, field research, and qualitative interviews with affected members of the community. However, this would take time, and the Atlanta Police Foundation along with several members of Atlanta City Council want to complete the deal by Labor Day of 2021, signing over control to the very institutions that caused so much harm and potentially bulldozing that history forever. The people of Atlanta deserve answers.