Old Sparky

The oak chair in the replica execution chamber here killed 361 people between 1924 and 1964. Texas had centralised executions the year before it was built, taking them away from the counties and moving them to the Huntsville Unit about two and a half miles from this spot; the last public county hanging had already happened, in Brazoria County in August 1923. Prisoners built the chair themselves out of oak, fitted with leather restraints and a copper cap for the head, and the first executions came on 8 February 1924. The last was Joseph Johnson Jr, on 30 July 1964. Then Texas executed nobody for eighteen years. It resumed just after midnight on 7 December 1982, back at the Huntsville Unit, when Charles Brooks Jr became the first person anywhere in the world put to death by lethal injection. Since then Texas has executed far more people than any other state, though over the whole span of American history that distinction belongs to Virginia. The Texas Prison Museum was founded in 1989 by former prison employees and moved to this building beside the interstate in 2002. The posture they take is documentary rather than macabre: contraband weapons made in the cells, a cell door, inmate craftwork, administrative records, with the chair at the centre. Huntsville has been a prison town since 1849, and the prison system is the largest employer in the county, so this is an industry museum as much as anything else.