Clifton Cliff Jail

Clifton Cliff Jail
The Clifton Cliff Jail when it was still in use. Notice the barred windows in the rock wall and the railroad tracks in front of the building.
Alternative names	Cliffside Jail
General information
Town or city	Clifton, Arizona
Country	United States
Opened	1881

The Clifton Cliff Jail is the original town jail in Clifton, Arizona. It was built in 1881 and first restored in 1929. The jail is now part of the Clifton Townsite Historic District, which was added to the National Historic Register in 1990.

Clifton is a small mining town located in a canyon at the confluence of Chase Creek and the San Francisco River. Before the construction of the jail, Clifton's criminals were punished by being sentenced to work in the mines. However, many of the prisoners escaped before they completed their sentence. As a result, in 1881 two Arizona pioneers called the Lesinsky brothers decided to have an escape-proof jail constructed to hold the prisoners. To make it escape-proof, the Lesinskys simply had it built into the side of a solid granite cliff. When it was first built, it was higher up in elevation than the surrounding town and could only be approached by climbing up the side of the cliff. Over the years, sediment from floods gradually raised the ground level even with the entrance to the jail.

The job of building the jail was given to Margarito Varela, who was a stonemason. Varela worked away at the face of the cliff with pick and drill and blasting powder. A small room was made to hold the more dangerous inmates, and a larger one – eight feet wide by twenty feet long – was built for the least violent. Both of the cells were fitted with massive iron bars that were two inches wide and three-fourths of an inch thick. The doors were of the same material, pivoting on two inch solid iron rods. The two windows of the jail were ten feet above the floor.

Tradition says that when Varela finished the job he decided to celebrate. After Varela invested his profits in snakehead whiskey, he was so happy that the jail was finished he pulled his sidearm and proceeded to shoot up Hovey's Dance Hall to attract peoples' attention and to tell them the news. The proprietor of the hall, who was also the deputy sheriff, arrested him, and Varela became the first prisoner held in the jail.

The old stone jail was the only one in Clifton for several years. Over time, it housed many criminals, including Augustine Chacon, who was captured in 1895 after a gunfight in nearby Morenci. The jail was closed eleven years later in 1906, when a large flood nearly submerged the building. The water was so deep that the prisoners had to be pulled out by ropes through a small window high up in the roof. After the flood the jail was filled with mud and debris, and so it was abandoned. The building went unused until 1929, when Mayor Peter Riley of Clifton started the process of having it restored. Now it serves as another interesting reminder of law enforcement on the American frontier.