This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
If Sheriff Cralle of Rock Island County were alive today, he might have a solution or two to the vexing problem of jail overcrowding. In the winter of 1901-02, he had a plan that cleared out the Rock Island County Jail in just under two months.
Jail space had always been more of a problem for Rock Island County than most others, especially during the hard times which seemed to come around every decade or so. With seventy-four trains arriving at Rock Island and Davenport every day from all directions, it was natural that vagrants riding the rails should congregate here. Often, they ended up in jail for the winter when it was too cold to sleep outdoors.
That was the case in November of 1900. Fifteen such boarders were whiling away the winter in the jail, swapping stories and waiting ‘til March. Together with the prisoners there for crimes of one sort or another, they more than filled the cells.
Sheriff Cralle had a plan. He had a pile of large rocks brought into the yard, and, just as in the cartoons, he set his prisoners to work breaking the rocks into smaller rocks.
That very day, three of the prisoners scaled the nine-foot brick wall and made their escape into the cold. Three others left as soon as they had served their sentences and never returned.
By the end of January, there was only one vagrant left on the rock pile. He grew so weary, tired, and homesick that he took to his bunk, unable to work. Constable G. W. Sample, who had been assigned to guard the rock pile, found himself enjoying a vacation from his duties, as potential vagrants disappeared from the streets of Moline and Rock Island.
The constable discovered why. Hobos and tramps who ride the rails have a set of secret signs with which they mark railroad cars, telling other vagrants which towns are friendly toward them and which to avoid as mean towns. That's what the fourteen men had done after they left.
Trains carried the news all across the United States: avoid Rock Island County. In hobo camps, the rock pile grew into legendary proportions. And as long as the chalk marks lasted, the Rock Island County jail was not overcrowded.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
