THE DAY THEY BLEW UP THE NUCLA TOWN JAIL

By Wilford Hill, from the Sentinel Sunday Magazine, May 31, 1987 pg. 11.

A deafening explosion shattered the stillness, rocked the earth with quivering tremors and literally shook the Nucla citizenry from sound sleep into a state of shock.

It was 2:10 AM, Wednesday, February 21, 1951. I sat straight up in bed. “Who in the hell is blasting at this time of night?” I asked myself. My wife, who was also woken by the blast, conjectured fearfully that it must be an atom bomb. “They have been testing them lately in New Mexico,” she reminded me.

We both dressed hurriedly and went outside where a small crowd of people had already gathered across the street between the telephone office and the old town hall.

They were talking loudly, each trying to out talk the other in describing his version of the blast.

“That explosion raised me up in bed at least two feet,” said one bloke.

“It shook the whole house, and some of the dishes fell out of the cupboard,” another declared.

“ Well, it was one of the hardest blasts I ever felt,” an old miner concluded, ”and I’ve been around a lot of them.”

As we approached the group, I saw a couple of friends, Ken Houston and Dan Telk. Ken turned and asked if I had any idea where the explosion might have come from.

“I don’t know,” I answered, “It had to be pretty close around here somewhere. I even heard gravel falling on my roof.”

“Ah, that’s crazy,” Telk retorted.

“It isn’t any crazier than you,” Houston said to Telk. “Look at you. Where are your pants?”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting any women to be here, and I was in a hurry,” he replied defensively.

About that time a man of slight build and medium height sauntered up. It was Joe Simrod, an employee of the locally owned telephone company. Simrod had come to town about four months previously and no one knew much about him. He seemed like a fairly friendly person.

“That was some blast wasn’t it?” I said.

“Yessir, I’d say that was a real boomer,” Simrod said.

No one paid much attention to him; he left for a few minutes then returned with startling news, which he blurted out.

“Somebody, I mean they blew up the jail,”

Everyone turned to face him.

“The jail,” somebody asked incredulously.

“Yep, the jail,” he repeated again.

Everyone rushed over behind the old town hall where the jail was located.

“Holy Moses,” someone shouted, “would you look at that jailhouse door?”

The door was of wooden construction and about five inches thick. Everyone looked at it in awe.

One person observed, ”That seems to be the only damage except for that crack there that runs all around the top of the walls.”

There was some speculation as to why the door was damaged so badly and the rest of the jail remained; at least so it seemed, fairly intact. One old miner, experienced in explosives, ventured that it looked like someone had tied explosives to the jail door.

“Probably dynamite, and it blew up and away from the building,” he explained.

“Well,” the sheriff, who had now happened upon the scene, declared, “we can’t tell much about the damage ‘til daylight. We might as well all go home.”

When daylight came it was much easier to see the damage—every window for two blocks up and down Main Street had been shattered. Cracks developed in the interiors of many buildings.

As far as the jail itself, well, that was a different matter. It was a heavy concrete structure, eight feet wide by about twenty feet in length and seven feet high. The walls and roof were eight inches thick. The explosion had blown the roof loose from the rest of the structure and left a crack around the top of the building. The door was literally reduced to splinters.

Determining the guilty party became the most important item of business that day. As long as they, or he, remained free no one felt at ease. There was fear deep in the heart of everyone that his home or business might be next.

It had to be some kind of nut, townsfolk reasoned. Only a nut would blow up a building as had been done to the jail. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

Town authorities immediately put up a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the guilty person or persons. There was one clue; all the people who had ever spent time in the old jail and who had expressed a desire to get rid of it were suspects. Unfortunately, half of the town’s population had spent time in the jail at one time or another.

The old jail was not what one might consider desirable under any conditions. There was no water and no heat. The jail had never been used for prolonged occupancy. It served, generally, as a place to sober up quarrelsome drunks.

A town marshal once said, “I threw many a drunk in there, and I can tell you, in the middle of the winter, they gentled down mighty fast. After about four or five hours in there, and the temperature down around zero, they sobered up and were ready to go home.”

Toilet facilities were also minimal. “We didn’t need none, we just used a shovel and left the door open now and then to let it air out,” the marshal said.

Before the reward was actually offered, a drinking buddy of Simrod’s, Bud Boice, came forward and gave town officials the information they needed.

The information: Joe Simrod blew up the jail.

Simrod was the fellow who had been so helpful in locating the source of the explosion. When Simrod was arrested and questioned he readily admitted his guilt. Happy Draves, the owner of the telephone company and Simrod’s employer, remarked at the time of the arrest that it was bad enough having all the windows blown out of the telephone company’s office, but why did it have to be with telephone company dynamite! Simrod it seems, had stolen the dynamite,a few sticks at a time, from Draves, until he had accumulated about fifty sticks.

Simrod was one of the jail’s regular customers. Although he was an agreeable fellow when sober, he was quite disagreeable when drunk. Almost any night there was a dance; Simrod got drunk, picked a fight with someone and ended up in jail.

Boice explained that the night of the explosion, he and Simrod had been drinking. There was no dance that night and the two had been prowling around town. After a time, Simrod confided to Boice that there were several people in town who were going to be sorry before the night was over.

He told Boice that he had a bundle of dynamite that he had stolen from the telephone company, and that he had made up several small bunches and tied them to several businesses, private homes and the local hotel.

He was going to light the fuses in a few minutes.

Boice was aghast at the plan and said he told Simrod, ”Joe, you can’t do that! Why they would put you in the nut house ‘til you were old and gray. Go get all that dynamite and get rid of it.”

The mention of the nut house struck a sore spot in Simrod. Rumors had it that Simrod had been released from a mental institution just before he came to Nucla. Boice was not aware of this when he made the remark.

Boice said Simrod left and was gone about 30 minutes. When he came back Boice asked him if he had gotten rid of the dynamite.

“Yes, I did, I sure did,” Simrod said, according to Boice.

It wasn’t long before the horrendous blast shook the ground where the two stood. It was felt as far away as two miles. Minnie Thompson, who lived about a mile from town, reported that when she first hear it, she thought someone had slammed a door, but then she felt the earth tremors.

Boice didn’t know where Simrod had disposed of the dynamite and didn’t care to hang around long enough to find out. He headed for home as fast as he could. He explained later that he did not want to be found with Simrod and be blamed for the explosion.

“I figured he had to be a little crazy to do a thing like that. After I thought it over I knew I had to tell the authorities. Why that nut might have decided to do it again.”

Simrod was taken to Montrose and jailed. At the hearing the judge asked Simrod why he had done it, and how much explosives he had used.

Simrod told the judge that the jail wasn’t a fit place for a pig, let alone a human being.

“I hated that place, and they kept locking me up in it. When my friend Boice told me to get rid of the dynamite, I couldn’t think of a better place than the jail. So I put fifty sticks of dynamite on the jailhouse door,” he reported gleefully, reports said.

Simrod was eventually returned to the mental institution he had recently been released from. The town patched up the crack in the jailhouse walls, and put on a new door, and used the jail for a few more years before a new one was eventually built.

Today the old jail sits abandoned and forgotten, among the weeds and grass, behind the present county building on Main Street in Nucla. The explosion was never forgotten. Old timers will tell you, “It sure was some blast.”