Weird South:
Archive Materials on the Old Atlanta Prison Farm
Materials Sourced:
Physical Material: Mary N. Long Papers, Series II. Grady Memorial Hospital, 1969–1987. Box 3, Folder 8, entitled “Grady Memorial Hospital: City of Atlanta Prison and Farm, 1971–1979; Undated.”
Digital Material: 2 Photos from the late 1930's taken at was Atlanta’s Prison Farm, (1930s-1995), from Georgia State University’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archive which is part of the Special Collections and Archives at the Georgia State University Library.
For those unfamiliar with the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, it is infamous to urban explorers, movie productions and vagrants alike as a huge 400+ acre space in the Southeastern quadrant of the city containing the increasingly dilapidated remains of the City of Atlanta’s Prison Farm. In the 1930's the Farm was started as an experiment in rehabilitation, also known as a prison “honor-farm.” The Prison Farm employed the most trust worthy prisoners to work and harvest the land there in order to feed themselves and the rest of the prison population at the Federal Penitentiary, located just up McDonough Road. It was a success, and soon temporary shacks for farming were replaced by cement and brick structures, including: a laundry facility, a dairy barn, etc. The Farm was officially closed in 1995, but it is unclear whether the Farm had been operational for the entirety of that time. The buildings were left as they were. File cabinets filled with prison paperwork and prisoner files abandoned.
Today, the media’s mention of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm is either about destructive fires that seem to regularly break out, or about the public’s call for something to be done with the enormous green space that the Prison Farm occupies. The first fire occurred in 2009 on the second floor of the larger structure that would have held everything from living quarters to holding cells, the most recent fire happened just last month, eerily on Friday, October 31st, Halloween. On my visit last Saturday, November 8th, the odor of burnt wood and ashes still smelt fresh. The damage to the roof can be seen from the Google Maps image above.
Mary N. Long’s Involvement with the Old Atlanta Prison Farm, 1970's.
Mary N. Long, RN was involved in a decision about the health care of the prisoners in the city’s detention department, which included Atlanta’s Prison Farm. From one folder entitled “City of Atlanta Prison and Farm” the contents ranging from hand written inter-office notes to official proposals and decrees that tell a sort of mixed-up narrative. The two pictures above show a report by Long from November 1971 addressing health care improvements of the City’s Prisons; oddly the hand written note on the right is from a nurse Millard from November 1977 and within the health department. The note seems to be in critique of the prison and farm’s ability to bring prisoners to their appointments at Grady Hospital on time to recieve the proper dosages of their medications. There was also a note from someone within the prison system stating how the prisons are taking advantage of the prison’s already meager health care system. Blaming prisoners for refusing to go to their appointments, etc.
Nevertheless, in Long’s 1971 report, she makes a mention of touring the Farm, remarking that her and her colleagues, “found that it was not as outdated as [she] thought it would be.” The tour and subsequent meetings of the Prison and Farm were in an effort to update the level of health care provided at the Prison, namely to create positions for a team of nurses and on-call doctors to screen incoming inmates for things like TB or venereal diseases, and see to their daily, non-emergency needs. That’s where Grady Memorial Hospital and Mary N. Long come in. Whether or not this reform took place and sufficiently improved the welfare of the City’s immates is anyone’s guess. This particular folder in Mary N. Long’s collection seemed to tell a story of the Prison’s health care “reform” through the correspondence and meeting-notes in Long’s work, but knowing that the prison farm would only be closed and abandoned 15 years later leads one to see a very different story. Needless to say, to Long’s credit, she, alongside the Health Department acted as expert consulters on what would have been a contract deal with the City in an effort to improve the quality of treatment for these inmates. Who, like the prison farm itself, have a tendency to be forgotten and abandoned by the city / society that they come from.
Early Images of the Atlanta Prison Farm, 1937 / 1940: Then and Now
Information
(Image-A)Name: “View of the Atlanta Prison Farm in south Atlanta, Georgia, January 3, 1937.”
Date: 1937–01–03
Creator: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(Image-B)Name: “Working on the city prison farm, men carry large basket of corn, Georgia, November 3, 1940.”
Date: 1940–11–03
Creator: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Analysis
The Old Atlanta Prison Farm is more than just another home for street art or delinquency. It’s the largest inactive green space in the city of Atlanta. These G0ogle Map Images of the area that incases the prison’s ruins do not accurately express the enormity of its size, most of which is enclosed by rusted barbed wire fencing, all abandoned and left for wilderness to reclaim. Another aspect that is not easily tranlated through images alone is the sereneness of the urban decay. There is special irony in a former prison being reclaimed by natural so ruthlessly and unobstructedly as the Old Prison Farm.
My visit to the Prison Farm left me with mixed emotions on the space and its historical and contemporary legacy. There is a distinct beauty of decay that is associated with abandoned structures, and the way nature has in reclaiming them. But these forgotten spaces also have a reputation for breeding dangerous activity and behavior in a location that already is, (or was well on it’s way to being) structurally unsound. So how should the City reconcile these two interworking forces? Tear it down and build condos? Save and repurpose the remaining structures into a safe, historical green space or park? Until the city can untie itself from the tangle of red tape that is choking the area, the Prison Farm will continue to be a weird attraction (albeit an illegal one) for all to explore the creepy yet scenic ruins of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm.
