Gratiot (pronounced gray-shut) Street Prison in St. Louis was an interesting place. early in the war, it was, the only Federal prison in the Trans-Mississippi. Originally it was McDowell's Medical College established in 1840. So the inmates liked to refer to each other as "student" and spoke to each other about their "college life." When a prisoner got transferred or paroled they would refer to that person as a "medical school graduate."
The building itself was made of large gray granite blocks and had a huge cupola. It looked like a huge fortress. McDowell was pro-secessionist and as war loomed he bought cannon from the arsenal and put them in the cupola. So as the war broke out the Federals went to seize him and his cannon. But McDowell escaped to Tennessee and sent the cannon ahead of him. The Feds then turned this traitor's college into a prison. The classrooms became cells, the dissecting room the chow hall and the college museum the kitchen. Ironically, for having been a medical college, disease was rampant among the inmates, including a couple of bad rounds of smallpox. So little wonder some ancestors in this thread died there.
After the war McDowell returned to St. Louis and re-opened his college in another location, because the old building was too trashed by its service as a prison. By 1883 the entire compound was razed. Today the site is the parking lot for the Ralston-Purina World Headquarters.
