Oakley Prison Farm Fire, Mississippi 1913
The Oakley Prison Farm was a thorn in the side of the Mississippi Prison system, as it did not provide sufficient revenues to subsidize its operation, as did other facilities in the state. A limestone crushing business at the site was financially unsuccessful and attempts to grow crops in the farm’s poor soil yielded equally poor harvests. By the early 1910s the farm was used to house black prisoners, who occupied a building built by the reclaimed lumber of former penitentiary buildings. The prisoners were used as convict labor in nearby cotton fields, who paid the state of Mississippi for their services.
The prisoners were housed in a two story building which doubled as a warehouse for numerous materials which were stored on the first floor, many of which were inflammable. The prisoners lived on the second floor, using the floor as their collective bed. One stairway connected the floors, and there were no fire escapes. Upstairs windows were barred and there was no access by the prisoners to the building’s roof. Thus the only access to the second floor was the main stairway, making it easier for guards to maintain security when the prisoners were in the building for the night.
What caused the fire which broke out on the night of July 21, 1913 has never been determined, but the prisoners were on the second floor of the building when it began. The fire started on the first floor and the old wood of the staircase quickly burned through, closing off access between the floors. The fire spread quickly throughout the first floor, fed by the inflammable materials stored there, and climbed the walls and ceiling towards the second, the ceiling being merely the reverse side of the boards which comprised the second floor.
Efforts to fight the fire were largely in vain due to the rapidity with which it spread and the heat which confronted the firefighters. Efforts to reach the second floor to rescue the trapped prisoners were equally hopeless, the flames on the outside walls prevented the placement of ladders and the water thrown on the fire by guards and volunteers was ineffectual. There was little the security personnel and fire fighters could do but watch as the building burned to the ground.
They were joined by several people from neighboring farms, attracted by the brightness of the flames and the screams of the men trapped on the second floor of the building. Efforts by some of the prisoners to loosen the iron bars on the windows were soon defeated by the rising heat, and the screaming grew weaker as one by one the prisoners succumbed to smoke, asphyxiation, or heat. By the time the building collapsed the screaming had stopped. Thirty-five prisoners, all of them black, were killed in the fire.