The Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville, known as the Walls, ran a cotton and woolen mill that became the main source of cloth for the Confederate Southwest. In 1852 Governor Peter Hansbrough Bell persuaded the legislature to appropriate $35,000 for looms and spindles. The prisoners built the mill themselves, at almost double the original cost, and it began operating in June 1856. In its first year it processed 500 bales of cotton and 6,000 pounds of wool and earned the state more than $16,000. The penitentiary had taken its first three inmates, a cattle thief, a murderer and a horse thief, in 1849. During the Civil War the mill ran at full capacity. In 1862 the prisoners wove more than a million yards of cloth, which the Texas State Library counts as more than all the other clothing plants in the South combined.
By September 1863 the Confederate army was taking 75 percent of the output, for uniforms, tents, wagon covers and flour sacks; the rest clothed needy families of Texas soldiers, patients of the state lunatic asylum, prison employees and the convicts. Even at its best the mill could fill only about one-fifteenth of the army's requisition.
Convicts, enslaved people and free men worked in the mill, and Union prisoners of war were briefly held at the Walls. Income from prison labor made up more than a third of the state's wartime revenue. As the blockade tightened, army requests multiplied and cloth for soldiers' families was rationed, and later in the war worn machinery and financial trouble slowed production. A state historical marker erected in 1963 on 12th Street records the mill.
Getting there
30.7231, -95.5469
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
