Four Prisoners Escape City Jail Through Brick Wall
Four prisoners vanish from the city jail after a creative structural modification to the facility's masonry.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Four men were confined in the city jail Sunday night, imprisoned for sundry and divers petty offenses, but when the marshal went to look after his charges Monday morning he found that the birds had flown, having taken French leave through an opening which they had made by removing some bricks from the wall beneath the window.
“The birds had flown, having taken French leave through an opening which they had made by removing some bricks from the wall.”
Jail breaks were surprisingly common in the 19th-century frontier, often highlighting the fragility of early municipal infrastructure and the limited budgets of law enforcement in the rapidly expanding Washington Territory.
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