She and her friends, Evelyn Barone and Renee Houser, wondered if rust and decay had locked it shut. Opening it is part of what they want to accomplish in their mission to restore the jail, which may date back to the early 1900s. The women are members of a citizen's group pursuing the jail's history and money for its restoration. It's a pale yellow brick building, not much bigger than a telephone switch station, fenced with barb wire. Inside, the walls have been marked with graffiti and there's an iron cell.
Bars divide it into two separate holding cells.
Houser, the fifth generation of her family to live in Bryan County, doesn't think the jail has been used for at least 50 years. Today, people arrested in Bryan County are sent to the county jail, which was built in the mid-1990s. Prior to then inmates were locked up in a jail on the second level of the county courthouse built in 1938. Tourists probably won't flock to see the old city jail, but it has sentimental value, Barone said. The train stopped coming in the 1940s and the depot was sold in the 1950s.