The brick building is wide, but not tall; institutional and imposing, like something hauled here from an old military base. Narrow-paned windows all around have steel frames, letting in light, but nothing else. The building’s heavy front door is columned on both sides and rusting slowly from disuse. Access is through huge roll-up doors at the ends.

It hasn’t always been like that. From 1935 to 1963, the building held as many as 100 lawbreakers imprisoned for their crimes. Sparta Prison Unit 91 is now a N.C. Department of Transportation (DOT) facility, housing vehicles and equipment, not men.

Tire chains and tools hang from hooks on two parallel iron-bar walls extending from floor to ceiling, forming a front-to-back walkway for the guards. Beyond the rear door a narrow hallway ends at another heavy steel door. The prison’s barbershop was on the hallway’s right side, the infirmary on its left. A bathroom for each ward fits into the corner between the building’s rear wall and the outside of that hallway, and was accessible only from within the prisoners’ areas. Each “head” had three small, tankless commodes and a long metal sink. The hallway’s back door was opened at mealtimes, giving inmates a short walk to the mess hall just up the hill.

Unlike the familiar two-man cells, these prisoners moved freely within the large bays on either side of the guards’ passageway. Rows of bunk beds lined both long walls. Modern fluorescent lamps have replaced the old hooded, single-bulb fixtures no longer functional, but visible high overhead.

Two guard towers were placed diagonally across the compound, and above a steel-mesh fence twelve feet high and topped with barbed wire. Armed guards with dogs patrolled the area inside the compound. The prison’s bloodhounds lived in a pen away from the inmates’ area.

A short distance from the barracks, one small and nearly cubical building appears to be a pump house, but it’s not. That’s the “hole,” or “solitary.” Thick hinges support a heavy steel door that squeaked open reluctantly, most likely from my reluctance to see the horror ahead. The confining darkness made me want to run, not step inside. A narrow hallway goes from end to end, past two cell doors that are barred like those of a dungeon. Within each cell is a horizontal steel plate, supported eighteen inches or so above the cold concrete floor. More than forty years ago, a springless mattress would have been on top. An unruly inmate would be isolated in one of the cramped seven-by-seven-foot cells, often for seemingly endless weeks.

Each cell has a commode wedged into the corner, but these appear smaller than those in the barracks. Between it and the cell door is a simple sink perhaps a foot square. Valves controlling the prisoners’ water are beyond reach in the hallway, so a guard had to be called if an inmate wanted to wash his face or flush the commode. Each cell has a window, but its beaded glass prevents clear vision to the outside. It didn’t take long to see enough.

The prison was as self-sufficient as possible, with a few cows and pigs, a vegetable garden and several fruit trees, all maintained by inmates. Well-behaved prisoners convicted of lesser crimes were called “trustees,” and often worked outside the compound clearing roadside shoulders. When more manpower was required, shotgun-guarded “chain gangs” were brought out.

Several of the original buildings remain, some built by prisoners using river rocks and mortar. An inmate’s fan-shaped arrangement of smaller rocks seems out of place on either side of the smokehouse door. Years ago, the prison office was moved out of the enclosure and across town where it now serves as the central office building for Alleghany County Schools.

The underground “potato house” has double walls to allow good air circulation and keep the vegetables fresh. Beyond its swinging doors potatoes were stored in eight wooden bins with slightly elevated floors and walls nearly seven feet high. The structure suggests something between a Clydesdale’s barn and the ammunition bays buried in the sand at Fort Caswell.

An open front gate and the presence of heavy equipment softens the impact of being inside a prison, yet the buildings’ past doesn’t stray far from the present. There are no unfamiliar odors, nor is there a sense of being confined as the prisoners were; even so, unshackling my imagination brought an unexpected chill.

An inmate’s world was only a few yards wide, and shared with scores of others much like himself. Ours includes miles of busy highways and freedom. Outside, we slice time into minutes and hours, weeks and months. Inside, theirs was typically measured in years.

Future plans route an extension to the Sparta Parkway (bypass) across the old Sparta Prison’s property, carving a road through both past and present, then on toward the future.