This building has been standing at the foot of King Street since 1796. In the 161 years it operated as the Second Kent County Jail, it held murderers, debtors, and one family of jailers who ran it across five generations and never once left. What follows is the documented record — not a theme, not a recreation, but the actual history of 110 King Street, told in the order it happened.
The Rhode Island General Assembly appointed Richard Mathewson of East Greenwich to build a new jail at the lower end of King Street, near the town dock. Three Hundred Pounds were granted from the General Treasury, paid in three separate installments. Mathewson and his partner Earl Mowry began construction that year — Mathewson contributing 260 days of personal labor. A committee of three was simultaneously appointed to establish the legal boundaries of the jail yard, recorded in the Acts and Resolves as the Liberties of the Gaol-Yard. The building was, from its first moment, an act of government — commissioned with public funds, built on legally defined ground, and intended to serve the entire county.
By February 1796, the Second Kent County Jail was complete. The final accounts were audited at a total cost of £1,751 14s 4¼d — roughly $4,208.83 at the time. The building stood two and a half stories at the front, housing the jailer’s family in a clapboard residence with two massive chimneys and a slate roof. The jail block attached at the rear, containing eight first-floor cells with barred windows and four upper rooms reserved for debtors and cooperative prisoners. Above the front entrance, two hand-carved wooden figures — each approximately 30 inches tall, one painted black and one white, one a murderer and one a robber — were mounted and handcuffed together, symbolizing equal justice at a time when most people could not read. The building was always painted yellow. It sat at the foot of King Street, directly below the courthouse at the top of the hill, with an unobstructed sightline between them.
In 1880, jailkeeper Jotham Smith died after a prolonged illness, leaving his wife Everlin Place Smith to assume the role he could no longer fill. She had grown up in this building — born into the Place family, who had served as jailers of Kent County for decades before her — and she would run it for the next fifty years without interruption. In her first year on the job, she discovered the body of murderer Isaiah Carr at 7:30 in the morning while serving breakfast. He had strangled himself in his cell with his pocket handkerchief. She testified at the coroner’s inquest, returned to the building, and continued her work. The Boston Globe profiled her in 1901, noting that in twenty years of service she had never once been assaulted by a prisoner. She managed murderers, a nationally covered murder suspect, and the jail’s most difficult inmate on her own terms. She died in this building in 1925, at age 80.
In 1889, the original wooden jail block at the rear of the building was demolished and replaced with a two-story brick structure, funded by two appropriations from the Rhode Island General Assembly totaling $10,000. The new brick building was considered a significant improvement — more secure, more permanent, more in keeping with the building’s civic purpose. It did not stay secure for long. The very first prisoners housed in the new structure escaped within days, breaching fresh mortar in the newly laid walls using a bedstead iron. The 1889 brick building is the structure that stands today. Its walls, its ironwork, and its proportions are original to that rebuild — and intact.
In 1901, William “Tug” McCaughey — a member of the notorious wire gang — was held at the Kent County Jail in connection with the nationally sensational murder of 24-year-old socialite May Fosburgh in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. McCaughey had implicated the gang in the killing, and the case drew coverage from newspapers across the country. The victim’s mother traveled to East Greenwich to interview him in his cell. That same year, the Boston Globe published its profile of Everlin Smith under the headline “Woman As a Jailer,” documenting her management of McCaughey, convicted murderer George Congdon, and Charles Burns — described as the most contrary prisoner in twenty years of her service. The building that year held a nationally covered murder suspect, a convicted killer, and the worst inmate Everlin had ever managed. She fed them all three meals a day. Each one included cake or pie.
On May 17, 1928, Frederick E. Sunderland — a former Chief of Police of East Greenwich — was officially appointed jailkeeper of Kent County by Sheriff Michael B. Lynch. He and his wife Martha moved into the residence at the front of the building, taking over from Frank A. Burdick, the last of the Place-Smith-Burdick family line that had run the jail for nearly a century. Martha, born in Australia in 1881, became known to prisoners as “Mom” Sunderland — cook, matron, and, when necessary, the woman who appeared with a shotgun. In 1931, two inmates beat Fred severely enough that Martha was required to hold the remaining prisoners at gunpoint while he recovered. In 1950, a 19-year-old prisoner named Bernard Boulanger hoarded pepper over several weeks, threw it into Martha’s eyes on bean night, locked her in a cell, and fled. She was 68 years old. He was recaptured at gunpoint within minutes. The Providence Journal wondered why anyone would want to escape her cooking.
In 1957, the State of Rhode Island closed the Kent County Jail at 110 King Street. Frederick Sunderland, by then 81 years old, locked the cell doors for the last time. The building that Richard Mathewson had built from the ground up in 1795 and 1796 — that Hannah Smith had kept before him, that the Place family had run for decades, that Everlin Smith had managed for fifty years, and that Fred and Martha Sunderland had overseen for nearly thirty — went quiet. It passed to the Town of East Greenwich and briefly operated as the Antediluvian Calaboose Youth Center before standing largely dormant. Fred died in 1960. Martha followed in 1968. The building outlasted them both.
In June 1976, the Town of East Greenwich deeded the building to the East Greenwich Historic Preservation Society, which undertook a restoration of the structure including the original jail cells. Fifty years later, 110 King Street opens its next chapter as the Jailkeepers Inn — a fourteen-room boutique hotel in which every room is named for a figure documented in the verified history of this building. The ironwork is original. The brick is original. The proportions of the rooms are the proportions of the cells and quarters that preceded them. Nothing has been invented. Nothing has been embellished. The building is 230 years old. It did not need to be reimagined — only introduced.
Fourteen rooms inside a building that held its last prisoner in 1957. The cells are still here. So is the ironwork, the brick, and the history. The sentence, this time, is yours to choose.