The Old Bibb County Jail Is Gone but the Stories Remain

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 8, 2026 · How we verify

Nothing stands at 21 Court Square West anymore, which makes the Old Bibb County Jail an unusual entry in any field guide: the building that generated the stories was pulled down in 2015, and everything reported about it now sits in memory, in archived investigation notes, and in the record of the town around it. Centreville is the county seat of Bibb County, Alabama, a small place on the Cahaba River that has kept its courthouse business in the same few blocks for nearly two centuries.

The Old Bibb County Jail at a Glance

• Location: 21 Court Square West, Centreville, Bibb County, Alabama, within the Centreville Historic District
• Built: 1910, in a Renaissance Revival style matched to the adjacent courthouse
• Construction: brick, part of the county’s judicial and law enforcement complex on the square
• Reported use for executions: as late as 1949
• Taken out of service: around 2004
• Demolished: 2015, on grounds of safety and maintenance cost
• Status for visitors: gone. There is no structure left to enter

Why the County’s Cells Ended Up on Centreville’s Square

Centreville was a natural place for county business long before the 1910 jail went up. The falls of the Cahaba River near the town made it a strategic point for moving people and goods through the region, and Bibb County’s first post office opened here in 1821. Sarah Willis Chotard obtained a patent for land in the area in 1823, moved squatters off it, and laid out a plot for the new town. After several years of argument over where the courthouse belonged, Centreville became the permanent county seat in 1829, and the town was incorporated in 1832.

That settled the geography of authority. The courthouse square became the place where the county tried people, and the jail built in 1910 was designed to look like it belonged there, brick with detailing that echoed the courthouse next door. It held prisoners tied to local and regional criminal proceedings for close to a century. Reports indicate the facility saw executions as late as 1949, a detail that features in nearly every account of the building and one worth treating as the historical claim it is rather than as legend.

October 12, 1910: The Prisoner Who Never Reached the Cells

The jail’s first year coincided with the darkest documented episode in the county’s law enforcement history. In 1910, a white woman named Mrs. Crow gave birth to a child of what contemporaries called “doubtful color.” Under intense peer pressure she confessed that the child’s father was African American, but said she had been raped, and she named Grant Richardson, a man who lived near the Braehead Slope Mine Camp northeast of Centreville. Miners and other local residents resolved to apply what the record calls “summary vengeance” as soon as they learned the sheriff had him.

Deputy Sheriff Cam Riley apprehended Richardson on October 12, 1910, and was bringing him to the jail at Centreville for processing and trial when a mob waylaid them on the road. The mob took Richardson from Riley and shot him. Chief Deputy Sheriff Charles Oakley reached the scene as soon as word got to him and found the body, the shells, and the blood, but almost nothing usable and no witnesses. A coroner’s inquest was held once a special coroner was appointed; no result of it is known. This was the first recorded lynching in Bibb County.

It is not known whether Mrs. Crow ever faced charges over the accusation. What is known is that Richardson had lived in the area for a number of years with a fair reputation before the accusation was made. He never arrived at the jail, and the historical record does not establish which county lockup building was standing ready for him that day. It is a killing associated with the town and its sheriff’s office rather than a death inside the walls at Court Square, and honest storytelling about the site should keep that distinction intact.

Empty, Deteriorating, Then Razed in 2015

The jail stayed in use through most of the twentieth century and was retired from active service around 2004. It then stood vacant, which is usually the beginning of the end for a masonry building of that age. By the mid-2010s the structure had deteriorated badly. County officials weighed the cost of repair against the liability of an unsecured, failing building on the courthouse square and chose demolition. The old jail came down in 2015.

Its loss thinned out the Centreville Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The town has taken other hits: a violent tornado struck on May 27, 1973, and another on March 25, 2021, damaging the southern and eastern portions of Centreville and destroying the Bibb County Airport outright. The square itself survives, but the jail is not part of it anymore.

What Investigators Said They Recorded Inside

Before demolition, the empty jail attracted the interest of regional paranormal groups, as disused lockups usually do. The Tuscaloosa Paranormal Research Group conducted an investigation inside the facility in 2009 and reported several things its members considered unexplained:

• Electronic voice phenomenon sessions and EMF meter spikes recorded during a nighttime investigation
• Unexplained sounds and noises that investigators said they could not attribute to an ordinary source
• A sensation of being watched, described by more than one person present
• Anecdotal reports of abrupt temperature changes and brief shadow movement

All of this is anecdotal and represents what a specific group said it experienced on a specific night. EMF spikes in a century-old building with degraded wiring are not evidence of anything in particular, and audio artifacts in a large empty brick structure are notoriously easy to over-read. There is no documentation confirming a haunting at the site, and there never was. What the reports do establish is that people found the place unsettling to stand in.

Standing on Court Square Today

There is no visit to make in the usual sense. The building is gone, so there is nothing to tour, nothing to book, and no interior to investigate. What remains is the square itself in the middle of a small county seat about 35 miles southeast of Tuscaloosa and 70 miles northwest of Montgomery, with the historic district around it and the Cahaba River at the edge of town. Anyone drawn here by the jail’s reputation is visiting a location, not a structure, and the honest version of the story is that the phenomena people described ended when the walls came down.

For readers who want the documentary side, the county’s own published history is more substantial than the ghost accounts. Rhoda C. Ellison’s Bibb County, Alabama: The First Hundred Years and Verrell Donald Elam’s Bloody Bibb cover the ground the jail occupied for a century.

Sources

• 2020 U.S. Gazetteer Files (Census (official))
• Bibb County, Alabama
• Centreville city, Alabama (Census (official))
• State Climate Extremes Committee (SCEC) (Noaa (official))
• CENTREVILLE, ALABAMA – Climate Summary (Dri (official site))
• Wikipedia: Centreville, Alabama

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