Vaughan Street jail tour worth the wait

West End

Heritage Winnipeg’s annual Doors Open Winnipeg festival, which took place at the end of May, is a fun, mark-your-calendar annual event for many of us. The free festival illuminates our city’s fascinating past in a way that history books just can’t do.

Unlike other buildings, the Vaughan Street jail is only open to the public during the weekend event. Long lineups to tour the popular venue are common.

Defunct prisons are now a huge tourist draw. Many offer unique experiences including behind-the scene tours and lantern tours. Over a million people visit Alcatraz prison off the coast of San Francisco, Calif., every year.

The Vaughan Street jail was built in 1881. I wanted to know if conditions in the Victorian prison were really as dire as I had imagined.

The tour answered that question with a resounding ‘Yes!’ Historian Kristen Treusch ably embodied the part of Patrick Lawlor, the prison’s first governor, while leading us through the basement and the first floor of the crumbling building. Her entertaining anecdotes didn’t gloss over the poverty and mental illnesses that had plagued many inmates.

We learned that the youngest criminal ever housed in the jail was five-year-old Fred Bacon who was caught stealing in 1880. He was slight enough to pass through his cell bars and continued stealing from jail. He would have been re-incarcerated with hardened criminals, but a kind judge had a truant officer escort him to school every day.

A few stories were much darker which is the reason the tour wasn’t recommended for really young children. The horror-movie-worthy cells in the basement were also unsettling as back then they could have housed mentally ill inmates who had been dropped off by their families.

Treusch is the author of Forgotten History: The Untold Stories of Manitoba’s First Provincial Jail 1881-1930, so she has extensively researched the jail and Canadian society during that time. This made for a fascinating tour. Other volunteers played their historical bit parts with a lot of enthusiasm and the whole experience was really fun.

If you don’t want to wait until next years event to learn more about the dark side of Winnipeg’s past why not sign up for a tour with Treusch’s Square Peg Tours. It offers reasonably priced historical walking tours, paranormal tours and more. You can find tour dates and descriptions at squarepegtours.com

Unfortunately, the jail still doesn’t have a heritage designation, but Truesch and the non-profit Friends of the Vaughan Street jail are hoping this will change.