Minnesota: Preston – Jail House Inn

🔒 Sleeping Behind Bars in Minnesota — And Paying For the Privilege

Finding unusual places to stay had become something of an obsession for us over the years, and I’ll be honest, it started to feel a bit like a competitive sport. We’d accumulated a fairly impressive list of oddball, quirky and downright peculiar accommodation options dotted around the world, and we took no small amount of pride in that. Treehouses, converted windmills, houseboats, yurts — we’d done a few of those. But we were always on the lookout for the next spectacularly strange option.

You’d think, living as we do in the golden age of the internet, that finding listings of unusual places to stay would be the work of five minutes and a decent cup of tea. Type in a few search terms, up pops a helpful, curated list, job done. Sadly, no. What actually happened was that every single search led us straight back to the usual suspects — Expedia, Tripadvisor, Booking.com — all churning out the same dreary parade of mid-range hotels and chain motels. I half expected them to start suggesting Premier Inns on the outskirts of Wolverhampton. I love a challenge, though, and after wading through what felt like several hundred pages of frankly unhelpful websites, I eventually managed to put together a proper list of wacky, wonderful and genuinely unusual places to stay. And wherever humanly possible, we tried to build our travel plans around them.

One entry on that list had been nagging at me for a while. A bed and breakfast in the American state of Minnesota that had, in a previous and presumably less hospitable life, been a functioning county jailhouse. The establishment in question was the Old Fillmore County Jail and Carriage House, a building with a history that stretched all the way back to 1869, when it was constructed to serve the growing frontier settlement of Preston, Minnesota — a small town tucked away in the bluff country of the south-eastern corner of the state, close to the border with Iowa.

To put that date into some context, 1869 was the same year the Suez Canal opened and the transcontinental railroad was completed across America. The country was still licking its wounds from the Civil War, and out on the mid-Western frontier, law and order was something communities had to build for themselves, quite literally. So up went the Fillmore County Jail — a solid, no-nonsense structure designed to keep people in rather than welcome them warmly. It did exactly that, faithfully and without complaint, for just over a century.

In 1970, the county finally relocated its jail facilities to a more modern building, and the old jailhouse was quietly handed over to private ownership. It became a private residence, and rather commendably, the new owners didn’t strip out all the original features in a fit of modernising enthusiasm. The bars, the cells, the general atmosphere of mild incarceration — much of it remained. It eventually found its new calling as the Jailhouse Inn, a bed and breakfast for travellers who, for reasons best known to themselves, quite fancy the idea of voluntarily spending a night behind bars.

We were heading across the mid-West — one of those long, satisfying drives through the American interior where the landscape unfolds in an almost theatrical way, all big skies and grain silos — when we decided to make the detour to Preston. It’s a small, quiet sort of town; the kind of place where not a great deal has happened since about 1952, which is not a criticism, merely an observation. It sits in the Root River valley, and the surrounding area is genuinely rather beautiful in a gentle, rolling way that doesn’t shout about itself. Very understated. Very Minnesotan.

The Jailhouse Inn offers a few different room options, and after giving them some thought, we went for the obvious choice: the Cell Block. Because if you’re going to do a thing, you may as well do it properly. This is where guests can spend the night in the original cells and get what the inn somewhat optimistically calls “the real jailhouse experience.” One assumes the real jailhouse experience also involved rather worse food and considerably less choice about being there, but we let that slide.

The cells, as you might expect of a building designed in 1869 for the incarceration of frontier miscreants, were not originally conceived with guest comfort in mind. The architects — if they can be called that; it was probably more of a case of a man with a pencil and some strong opinions about thick walls — had not thought to include en-suite bathrooms, pillow menus or blackout curtains. They had, however, built something reassuringly solid, which is frankly more than you can say for a lot of modern hotel construction.

Over the years, there had been some thoughtful modifications to make the place habitable for paying guests rather than reluctant residents. They had managed to squeeze two queen-sized beds into two of the cells — cells that were, it has to be said, never designed to house a queen-sized bed. The fit was extremely tight. There was essentially no space at the foot of the beds whatsoever, which presents something of a problem if you happen to be six feet six inches tall. Fortunately, I am not quite that tall, though I am tall enough to appreciate the difficulty. The solution, we quickly worked out, was to sleep on the diagonal, which sounds eccentric but worked perfectly well once we’d committed to it.

Other creature comforts had been introduced with admirable ingenuity. There was a television, a couple of high-backed chairs that gave the whole arrangement a certain unexpected dignity, and — this was the real surprise — a substantial bath fitted with jets. A proper jetted bath, right there in the old county jail. I very much doubt that featured in the original 1869 building specifications. One imagines the county commissioners of Fillmore County had rather other priorities at the time.

After a night in the cells, we woke the following morning feeling, rather against all reasonable expectation, completely refreshed. There is something oddly restful about sleeping somewhere with very thick walls and a notable absence of road noise, traffic or the general ambient hum of modern life. We were also rather pleased to discover that the cell doors were not, in fact, locked. One does like to check.

We made our way to the breakfast room, where our hosts Marc and Jeanne had clearly been hard at work since an unreasonably early hour. The food they had prepared was quite beautifully presented — the sort of breakfast spread that makes you feel faintly guilty about the fact that you’re simply going to eat it. Everything arranged just so, colours considered, portions generous. It almost seemed a shame to disturb it. We managed to overcome that particular scruple without too much difficulty and set about demolishing the lot with considerable enthusiasm.

Over breakfast we fell into easy conversation with the other guests, who turned out to be fellow travellers rather than local Minnesotans. They had come down from Canada, which gave the whole gathering a pleasingly international flavour — two lots of people from outside the United States, voluntarily imprisoned in a Victorian-era county jail, eating beautifully presented eggs and chatting cheerfully about their travels. If that’s not the modern world in miniature, I’m not sure what is.

Would we recommend it? Absolutely, without hesitation. The Jailhouse Inn is exactly the sort of place that makes travel worth doing — somewhere with a genuine story behind it, a bit of history, a touch of the absurd, and hosts who clearly take real pride in what they do. It won’t suit everyone, particularly anyone over six foot six, but for those of us who like our accommodation with a side order of character, it was rather brilliant.