The Planned Impressions for 2016

Time marches on, and I'm well into planning for the impressions I will display in 2016. I currently plan two impressions, an 1861 NJ State Prison Deputy Keeper, and an 1810 NJ Penitentiary Assistant Keeper.

The 1861 Deputy turned out to be easy to settle on- Since a formal uniform pattern was not mandated until mid 1880 and I have records that confirm that the issued longarm was the 1861 Springfield Rifled Musket as produced under contract by the Trenton Arms Company for Civil War service, all I needed to research was the cap. There are no known photographs or illustrations of State Prison staff before the year 1882, so the style of cap was settled upon through research into service cap styles for policemen, military personnel, ship's crews and the like that were standard or common for the time period. It turns out that one style was almost universal during that era and was almost certainly the cap used by the Officers of the State Prison at Trenton. It is best known as the Union Naval Officer's Cap even though it had existed for at least a decade previous to the Civil War and was used in many different services.

Because the announcement that was made about the first standardized uniforms at the State Prison in 1880 made a big point of stipulating that the outfits would be blue, I surmised that the earlier caps were very likely black or dark gray. To avoid the obvious stigma associated with gray uniforms, I decided on black. These caps usually had embroidered emblems and job titles on their front between the crown and the chin strap. For the State Prison cap I decided on an early version of the NJ State Arms and the words STATE PRISON embroidered on black wool broadcloth:

It was pretty much standard for police and prison officers in the years before the Civil War and in many places for decades after the conflict to dress in plain business attire and wear an official cap sporting a badge, symbol or wording denoting their official office or title. As late as 1874 when the Chief of Police of Hackettstown NJ was murdered by a suspect during an arrest, he was the only paid full time Police Officer in town. He had unpaid volunteer special officers who drew a police cap and a baton at City Hall when they were called to duty. In earlier times, local police officers had no uniforms or badges and made due for identification by placing hat bands embroidered with POLICE or DEPUTY on their Stetsons or top hats:

The embroidered cap worn by prison officers otherwise dressed as bankers or businessmen was the norm and lasted until prisons adopted uniforms for the custody staff in the years after the Civil War:

Thus clothed they looked as much like railroad conductors as anything else. That similarity as opposed to looking anything like police, as well as the influx of Civil War veterans returning home after the conflict, men who proudly fought and bled wearing the blue garb of soldiers in the Union Army may account for the overall shift to blue uniforms and hats in the law enforcement field in the last quarter of the 19th Century. The 1861 NJ State Prison Deputy impression will be a suit such as the men in the above photo are wearing, with the black cap pictured earlier.

The 1810 recreation is much more difficult. In reasoning this one out I had to make a number of deductions about clothing and equipment. There are absolutely no written descriptions of the clothing, no illustrations, no surviving examples of like equipment or clothing to study. In deciding on which way to go here I followed the only equipment with a documented history upon which I could draw: The firearms.

From the very beginning, up until approximately 1930, the State Prison drew long guns from the stocks of the NJ State Militia (later the NJ National Guard) for use at the original Penitentiary House from 1798 through 1836, and at NJ State Prison from then on. Through exhaustive research I discovered reports from the Arsenal Commandant to the General of the NJ Militia/National Guard and the Governor detailing types and amounts of arms and ammunition supplied to the State Prison: Muzzle loader muskets, then 1861 Springfields, 1873 Trapdoors and later Krag rifles in the 1890s, each older type returned to the State Arsenal in exchange for the newer, more modern arms.

With this close, century long relationship with the State Arsenal and their stocks of arms and supplies, it was not unreasonable to extrapolate a connection, at least in style, between the State Militia's other equipment and the supplies and clothing in use at the NJ Penitentiary.

The standard militia headgear was known at the time as a Round Hat, what we call a Top Hat now. NJ units wore either a leather or beaver round hat with either a tin plate bearing an emblem of a US Eagle and a unit designation held to the front by a leather strap, a brass stamped emblem pinned to the hat or the emblem painted onto the hat. There is one surviving example of a NJ militia round hat, at the museum at Morristown park, the hat worn by the Morris Rangers in the War of 1812. It is a beaver felt hat with a tin hat plate strapped to the front. As this is the only authentic New Jersey hat I can document from the time period that was actually used by the NJ militia, I decided on this hat as the model for the reproduction for the 1810 Assistant Keeper. The tin hat plate will have a depiction of the State Arms of 1812 and the words New Jersey Penitentiary painted on it instead of what you see below:

The clothing will be generic militia clothing in colors consistent with NJ local militiamen- A plain jacket in dark blue wool with brass buttons, linen or wool trousers, white vest and shirt. These are items in an easy to make style that were commonly made at home or locally when the militia units were directed to adopt some form of common dress when military operations were likely, such as the mass call ups for Shays Rebellion, the undeclared war with France in the late 1790's, and the War of 1812. With these call ups having occurred three times in 40 years and Trenton being not only the State Capitol but also the seat of the government of the United States for several years during summers in the 1790's, the Trenton area militias would have been better equipped than the average back country militia unit. There would have been uniforms and uniform suppliers around in 1798, and the Officers of the Penitentiary House very likely dressed in these available garments.

A standard US Springfield 1795 Musket and bayonet (readily available as replicas on the reenactor market) cartridge box or kit bag and standard period leather goods will round out the impression.

The rationale is that, with the frequency of escapes from the Penitentiary House (judging from newspaper stories from the time they were chasing escaping inmates down the street, shooting up the neighborhood and marching prisoners back to the jail at the point of bayonets as often as once or twice a month) they would quickly have seen the need for the Prison Officers to be easily identified by the public- If you look into your back yard and you see two men struggling over control of a musket and they're both dressed in crummy, nondescript clothing, who do you help? The Keeper would almost certainly have made some provision for his Officers to be easily identified on sight, and this would have been the cheapest as well as the most likely way he may have done so, given what we know about law enforcement in those times. The State of New Jersey seems to have regarded the staff at the Penitentiary as an armed service similar to the State Militia, only a law enforcement organization rather than a military unit. It's safe to be guided by this when making decisions on how to portray the early State Prison Officer, given that we have nothing else to go on.

The trials and tribulations of creating what may be the only real vintage Prison Officer impression out there...

I know what you're thinking: How in the actual hell did I wind up doing a recreation of 19th Century Prison Officers? I'm sometimes surprised by it myself, although maybe not that I am actually doing impressions- I used to march with Union Army Civil War reenactors. I do sometimes find it remarkable that I found my way to this particular subject. Some explanations are in order...

I didn't just pick this impression out of a hat. As I've already said, I have some reenacting experience, so I already knew I had the temperament and predilection to do historic impressions. The subject, however, is not one that the average person on the street would choose or even think of as a subject to recreate, unless...

I was a Correctional Officer. In late 1989 I walked into a correctional facility in New Jersey as a recruit Correction Officer. I walked out in mid 2015 into retirement as a Major, a commanding officer at New Jersey State Prison, the maximum security lockup at Trenton. In 25 1/2 years on the job I saw, heard and did many things, as one would expect- some good, some bad, and much of it challenging. In and around the career, I developed a burning curiosity about the history of the State Prison and the Officers who served there over the last two centuries. I'd always been curious about prison history, but the burning part started one evening while I was on an online genealogy site, working on my family tree.

I was hard at work filling in the blanks in my tree, searching and verifying resources, tracing family lines and connections, and with no warning whatsoever something pivotal happened: I found someone I was not expecting. I discovered a text transcription of a City Directory for Trenton, New Jersey dated 1882, and unsurprisingly I dove right in looking for people named Sanderson. After skimming the S section it became sadly obvious that there were none. I was disappointed, but not terribly surprised- I was to find out when I finally managed to trace my bloodline that my Sanderson family was not only very elusive, but also they weren't from New Jersey- They were from Massachusetts- My 2nd Great Grandfather came down to Jersey in the 1890's when he became a partner in a business in Trenton and married there a few years later.

When I didn't find any of the relatives I was searching for, I let my curiosity roam, settled in with an iced tea and browsed the document. It was an early enough edition- 1882- that there were no telephone numbers listed with the names- In 1882 very few telephones were to be found in private homes in America. The directory consisted of a simple alphabetical listing of names, followed by each person's address and their occupation. It was interesting to look at everyone's place of work and career written right there. Teamster. Cooper. Potter. Deputy State Prison Keeper. Dressmaker. WAIT- Go Back! DEPUTY WHAT?

Yup, there it was. Deputy State Prison Keeper. This guy worked at the State Prison in 1882! I started scanning the occupations and I began to find more and more of them. I was tickled- Here I was, a modern day correctional officer, looking at the names of the staff who worked in the very place I was serving, back in 1882. It was very, very cool.

I then realized that the directory I was looking at had been scanned through an Optical Character Recognition program and had been posted as text on a web page, and I could therefore highlight and copy it. I did just that, and then pasted the text into Excel, formatted it and Voila! I had a sort-able list! I sorted it so that everyone in the directory with the word PRISON listed in their occupation came out at the top, and there it was- Several dozen names- The crew at the State Prison in 1882, at least those who lived in Trenton. One guy was actually named Ahab!

I browsed through the group, looking at all of the names- There it was, that quickly, right at the top- The name I wasn't expecting: Joseph Ashmore Jr., occupation: Deputy Keeper, State Prison. That took me by surprise. I realized with a start that I'm related to Ashmores, and my Ashmores lived in Trenton during this time period. I had a feeling... I switched browser tabs over to the genealogy website where I research my family tree, followed the trunk up to the Ashmores, went back past my 3rd Great Grandmother and... There he was- Joseph Ashmore Jr., nephew of my 4th Great Grandfather!

I don't know why, but it never occurred to me that I had relatives that I never knew about that worked at the State Prison. Having now identified one, I suddenly realized that I had to know about this, my Cousin, Joe Ashmore. This was the beginning of it all. This was the tipping point where I passed from being just one of any number of correctional officers with only a passing interest in the history of the prison service in New Jersey to eventually being a full-bore, hard charging researcher, and eventually the volunteer historian of the NJDOC.

As for the period impression, it came from the discovery of and curiosity about my cousins at the State Prison as well. Yes, cousins. Joe Ashmore wasn't the only one I found. There were four more that I could identify through the old records. One of them was shot and killed in the line of duty at the State Prison in 1894. When I found out that James Lippincott, the first documented line of duty death in the history of the NJ Department of Corrections was also a distant cousin, I was hooked. The history of the service, the people who served, it had to come out of the basements and the old dusty files. It wasn't just the history I shared with all other NJ State Correction Officers. It was also personal- It was my family history.

And that's how The Vintage Prison Officer came to be. He is myself, but only because someone must don the old uniform. He's also James Lippincott, Joseph Ashmore Jr., Winfield Scott Carty, and all the rest. They were there. They made it all work. They fought and bled. Several of them died in the process. They should be remembered- and they will be.