Starting in the 1820s, Richmond imported British convicts as slave labor for building their village. One of the criminals’ biggest projects was constructing their own jail from 1825 until 1840. The stories you will read while walking around the gaol are ghoulish. You will learn how prisoners huddled together in cramped cells called the Sleeping Rooms while wearing leg irons. They were the lucky ones. Others suffered solitary confinement, were subjected to repeated lashings in the Flogging Yard and executed by Solomon Blay, known as the “The Hangman.” This Gaoler’s Residence, created by John Lee Archer in the 1830s, is at one end of the Airing Yard where prisoners were allowed to exercise twice a day.
