Thomas Goree Unit
men's prison in Huntsville, Texas
The Thomas Goree Unit (GR) is a Texas Department of Criminal Justice men's prison, located in Huntsville, Texas, 4 miles (6.4 km) south of downtown Huntsville on Texas State Highway 75 South. The Goree Unit is located within Region I. First opened in 1911, it served as the only women's correctional facility in Texas until 1982, after the women were moved to state prisons in Gatesville. For a period Goree held the state's sole female death row inmate, until her conviction was changed to a non-capital offense. There was more than one death row female at Goree in 1979.
History
The unit was named after Major Thomas J. Goree, who, in the late 19th century, served as a prison superintendent. The unit was first established in 1907, and it opened in 1911 as the Goree State Farm for Women, a women's prison. The facility had separate portions for White and African-American women. White and Hispanic women worked in the garment factory, while Black women worked in the fields.
In the 1930s Goree included the main building, separate sets of dormitories for black and white prisoners, an orchard, a cannery, a barn, crop fields, a hen house, and a cemetery for prisoners who had not been taken by surviving relatives. The dormitories had bars bolted onto the windows.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Goree Unit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.