Wyoming Frontier Prison
Visiting the Wyoming Frontier Prison
Take a tour of the Wyoming Frontier Prison. Haunted by history, the Wyoming prison tells tales of train robberies, wily escapes and women driven to crimes of passion. Additionally, you can explore the Wyoming Frontier Prison’s own Museum. The Old Pen Gift Shop is also on site and features unique Wyoming gifts and keepsakes.
Inside the Wyoming Frontier Prison
Explore the 49.5 acre facility where inmates lived and worked under brutal conditions over the 80 year operation of Wyoming’s first state penitentiary. Walk down the corridors parallel to block cells inmates once lived in and observe inmate artwork with an ominous message. Stand inside the dark, tiny cells to see where inmates spent most of their hours. Descending into the prison’s Death House, sit in the original gas chamber and fill your senses with the history of old Wyoming. The Wyoming Frontier Prison offers tours that will guide you through the cafeteria, the grounds, three of the former cell blocks and the Death House, where 14 men were executed for their transgressions, five of whom met their maker in the gas chamber.
Prison Museum
In addition to touring the Rawlins prison, browse Wyoming history in the Prison Museum where historical info including inmate profiles sits side-by-side with confiscated inmate-made weapons like shivs. Other historical artifacts showcased in the Prison Museum include a doll-sized working model of the humane gallows, a mounted display of rope samples from every successful hanging that took place at the prison and the hypno-wheel used by the prison psychiatrist. An exhibit dedicated to the movie Prison, filmed at the Wyoming Frontier Prison in 1987, is also on view in the Prison Museum.
Shopping in Old Pen Gift Shop
Located next to the Prison Museum is the Old Pen Gift Shop. The Wyoming Frontier Prison’s Old Pen Gift Shop offers a variety of gifts and keepsakes for all ages, from books to shot glasses, apparel to inmate made products and even art.
Travel Tips
- During your visit to the Wyoming Frontier Prison Museum be sure to check out the Wyoming Peace Offers’ Museum, a new exhibit on the current Wyoming State Penitentiary.
- Do not forget your camera. There will be exciting photo opportunities during your visit to the Wyoming Frontier Prison Museum.
Wyoming Frontier Prison, Rawlins, WY
80 years of history behind bars awaits you at the Wyoming Frontier Prison Museum as part of this group bus tour. Located at 500 West Walnut in historic Rawlins, Wyoming, the Wyoming Frontier Prison Museum, serving from 1901 to 1981, sent a message to the free-wheeling desperados in the area: Wyoming would no longer be a haven for the lawless. Throughout its time, the Prison hosted some of the rowdiest of the Old West including train robbers, horse thieves, murderers and 11 femme fatales. When the Prison closed its doors in 1981, it had seen at least 13,500 of Wyoming’s fiercest criminals and executed 14 of them. Reopened as a museum in 1988, the Wyoming Frontier Prison is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and offers tours to approximately 15,000 visitors annually.
