Qualla: Debtors' Prison (Accomac, Virginia)

Debtors' Prison (Accomac, Virginia): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. When the Accomack County court decided in 1824 to convert the jailer's house into a debtors' prison, the committee assigned to the work argued that the conversion would be simple. "Iron bars to the windows of inch iron and oak Batton doors to be hung outside, is all that is necessary," they wrote, "because it is believed that debtors have no inducement to brake prison, the Law authorizes them with little trouble to discharge themselves whenever they wish so to do." The committee had a point, if a cynical one. People who could not pay their debts had also not paid for an escape attempt. The iron bars went up. The oak doors were hung. People who owed money lived behind both for the next twenty-five years.

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Debtors' Prison (Accomac, Virginia): A House Before It Was a Prison

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. The small brick building in central Accomac, just down the road from the Accomack County Courthouse, was not built as a prison at all. In 1775 the county court ordered a committee to draw up plans for a new jail. The new jail went up, and alongside it a small house for the jailer...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Debtors' Prison (Accomac, Virginia): Debt as a Crime

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. In the early nineteenth century the Commonwealth of Virginia passed a law requiring separate facilities for people held on debt and people held on felony charges. The reasoning was practical and slightly less harsh than it sounds; debtors were not considered criminals in the mode...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Debtors' Prison (Accomac, Virginia): The Debtors Themselves

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. Imprisonment for debt was, by the standards of any modern reader, a cruelty disguised as a procedure. People held in places like the Accomac debtors' prison were not violent criminals. They were farmers who had lost a crop, shopkeepers who could not collect what they were owed, w...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Debtors' Prison (Accomac, Virginia): What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. The building is small: eighteen feet by thirty, a single story, three bays long, built of Flemish-bond brick with glazed headers. It sat in the southwest corner of a seventy-foot-square jailyard, and a fragment of the yard's brick wall still projects from the northeast corner, a ...

Image: Ser Amantio di Nicolao at en.wikipedia | CC BY 3.0