Newgate is the name of a famous prison in London. It is called “Newgate” because it was first built, centuries ago, over a new gate in the wall of the city. Later, when these rooms over the gate became too crowded, a larger prison was built near by and called by the same name.
There was once a Newgate prison in Connecticut. It was named for the old English one, but, instead of being up over a gate, it was down underground in a copper-mine. There was no entrance to it except by a shaft thirty feet deep, and the colonists chose this place for its security, yet the history of Newgate in Connecticut is full of tales of the daring and successful escapes of its prisoners.
Copper Hill, where the prison was, is in what used to be the town of Simsbury, but is now East Granby. The copper-mines there were opened early in 1700, and were worked for about sixty years. The copper is said to have been of good quality. In 1737-39, coins were made from it—some say by Dr. Samuel Higley who owned a mine near his home. These coins were never a legal tender, but were used as “token money,” because small change was scarce in the colonies. They are valuable to-day because they are very rare. Granby coppers have on one side a deer standing, and below him a hand, a star, and III, and around him the legend, “Value me as you please.” On the other side are three sledgehammers with the royal crown on each hammer, and around them either the word “Connecticut,” or the legend, “I am a good copper,” with the date 1737. A third kind has one broadaxe and the legend, “I cut my way through.” There is a specimen of each of the three kinds of Granby coppers in the Connecticut State Library at Hartford.
The mines were quite successful at first, but, as the colonists were not allowed to smelt and refine the ore in America, they were obliged to send it all the way to England, and this was very expensive. Sometimes, too, the ships carrying copper did not reach England at all. One was wrecked in the English Channel and another was seized by the French during a war with England. So in 1773, a few years before our Revolutionary War, the mines were given up and the largest of them was changed into a prison.
At first there were no buildings at all. There was nothing but a hole in the ground, closed by an iron trapdoor that opened into the shaft, where a wooden ladder was fixed to the rock at one side. At the bottom of the ladder there was a flight of rough stone steps leading farther down into the mine. All was dark and still except for the dripping of water along the galleries that led away into the heart of the hill. One cavern was blasted out to make more room and was fitted with wooden cells and bunks for the prisoners to sleep in, and at night a guard was set to watch the entrance up above and prevent any one from climbing the ladder and getting out. When everything was ready, the committee in charge of the work reported that it would be “next to impossible for any one to escape from this prison.”
The first prisoner sent there was a man named John Henson, who was committed on December 22, 1773. He spent eighteen days alone in the mine; then, on the night of January 9, 1774, he disappeared. No one could imagine how he got out. But there was another shaft leading up from the mine, a very deep one, where the copper ore had been drawn out. It had no ladder in it and its opening had not been closed, because it did not seem possible for a prisoner to escape that way. Yet a woman drew John Henson up eighty feet through the shaft in a bucket used for hoisting copper. After that, this shaft, too, was carefully closed and a strong wooden guardhouse was built over the entrance to the other one.
More prisoners were soon committed to Newgate. “Burglars, horse-thieves, and counterfeiters,” according to the law, were sent there and they were set to work mining copper, but instead of doing this, they dug their way out with the mining tools; so workshops were built aboveground where they made nails, boots and shoes, wagons, and other things. They slept in the mine as before, but at daylight they were called and came up the ladder in squads of three at a time under a guard, climbing as well as they could with fetters on their legs. They took their meals in the workshops and were chained to the forges and workbenches until late in the afternoon, when they went down again into the mine for the night.
When the Revolutionary War began, in 1775, political prisoners were sent to Newgate in Connecticut, just as such prisoners had often been sent to old Newgate in England. These men in America were the Tories, or Loyalists, who sympathized with the British and were often found giving them information and help. To protect themselves the Americans arrested them. Some of the first were sent by Washington from the camp at Cambridgik where the American army was besieging Boston.
Here is a part of his letter to the Committee of Safety at Simsbury; its date shows that it was written several months before the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia:—