Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (27 page)

“[David Williams] was a sandy-haired, broad-shouldered youngster, his light-blue eyes hard and unsmiling,” wrote Captain H. T. Peoples
in a lengthy 1951 article about Williams and his time inside North Carolina’s Caledonia Prison Farm. Peoples was the prison’s superintendent, and he remembered Williams well. “In the first month I don’t believe young Williams spoke more than twenty words to anyone.” Williams kept mostly to himself, failing even to correspond with his parents. When Peoples nudged him to send a letter to his distraught mother, Williams opened up for the first time and told him that he “didn’t want to write home from a prison postmark” and that he had “hurt them enough already.” Peoples also recalled:

A week later Williams requested a pencil and some paper, which Peoples gladly provided. When he caught Williams scribbling away after the other prisoners had gone to sleep, he saw that Williams was doodling instead of composing a letter. Peoples was disappointed at first but then noticed “the hard, bitter eyes were softening. Whatever he was doing, it was making him a little happier.”

Williams’s knack for fixing hopelessly broken-down machines earned him a coveted job running the metal shop. One night Peoples walked in on him slaving away with draft instruments, drawing boards, and sketches scattered everywhere. Williams made no effort to hide his handiwork, and the two men looked at each other for a moment.

“It’s … a new kind of gun,” Williams said. Then he broke into a rare grin. “Don’t worry, this has nothing to do with an escape. I wouldn’t try to escape now if the gate was wide open. I’ve got too much work to do, and this is a good place to do it.”

Now called the Caledonia Correctional Institution, the prison is located about ninety miles northeast of Raleigh. While driving up to
the facility, I might have thought a freak blizzard had recently swept through the rural county recently if it weren’t for the 95-degree heat; I’ve never seen cotton fields this late in the harvesting season, and the soft white clumps dotting the brown earth look like patches of thawing snow.

Waiting for me at the main entrance is my escort for the afternoon, Lieutenant Daryl Williams.

“Nice to meet you,” I say. “Are you related to David Williams?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But that means you could be,” I say.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

Daryl asks me if I want to go straight to the old metal shop or tour the whole facility.

“I’m up for the full deal.”

Daryl tells me that about 560 inmates are incarcerated here, and the total property covers 7,500 acres. Having watched enough prison documentaries, I don’t see anything at Caledonia that’s totally unfamiliar—cell blocks, cafeteria, yard, visiting area, and so on—but what does surprise me is how relaxed the environment feels. This isn’t to diminish the very real threats both the guards and prisoners face on a daily basis, but I expected the atmosphere to be more tense, vaguely hostile.

I mention this to Daryl, and he assures me that one has to stay alert at all times. “Just this morning we had an incident,” he says but doesn’t go into details.

We walk through the prison’s canning factory and its adjoining warehouse, which is packed high with generically labeled cans of corn, collard greens, applesauce, and fruit punch.

“Most of this will go to prisons and other state institutions throughout North Carolina—
except
public schools,” Daryl tells me while ducking out of the way of a small forklift hoisting pallets.

The facility seems clean and orderly, and I would confidently eat whatever’s in these cans (except the collard greens, but only because my Yankee taste buds find them bitter). I can understand, however, parents being somewhat wary about their kids slurping down fruits and
vegetables prepared by men incarcerated for rape, child abuse, drug trafficking, and premeditated murder.

We head back to the main building. “So this,” Daryl tells me, opening a door to a steep, narrow staircase, “is where the old blacksmith shop used to be.”

I follow him down, and we encounter about half a dozen prisoners in two adjoining rooms fixing the basement pipes. They all look over, and a few say hello.

“This used to be all one big space,” Daryl says as we step into the smaller room. Both are empty now.

I ask Daryl what would happen today if an inmate, especially one sentenced for killing a law enforcement officer, were discovered constructing a “new kind of gun” in the metal shop. The answer isn’t a surprise: He’d be locked up in a special disciplinary unit.

Back in 1921, Superintendent Peoples was less hamstrung by such regulations and not only encouraged Williams to keep at it but allowed him to pick through the prison junkyard for parts. Williams plunged in, collecting old tractor axles, Ford drive shafts, walnut fence posts, and other scrap items that he filed down, pieced together, and manipulated to construct half a dozen rifles. Guards stopped by to have Williams work his magic on their guns, too, whenever they needed repairs.

And it was at Caledonia that he constructed the prototype of what would become his most influential innovation: the short-stroke piston. In early models of semiautomatic carbine rifles, the entire barrel kicked back almost four inches to hit the breech mechanism. Williams cut that to one-tenth of an inch without losing substantial firepower. “You know how you can hit one croquet ball a long distance by holding your foot on another ball and transmitting the shock of the mallet?” Williams explained to Peoples. “It’s the same idea.” This alteration alone led to the production of a shorter, lighter, and more dependable rifle, the M1 carbine.

“I didn’t know it then, of course, but what this young prisoner was telling me that night would one day be considered by firearm experts
one of the most revolutionary advances since Browning’s development of the machine gun,” Peoples later wrote.

The notion of a cop-killing inmate assembling a small arsenal of handmade weapons behind bars didn’t sit well with some folks, and Peoples was summoned before North Carolina’s prison board in Raleigh to explain himself. According to one report, Peoples stated that he was so confident Williams wasn’t plotting to break out that he offered to serve the remainder of Williams’s sentence if he did.

That wouldn’t be necessary. Newspaper articles and word of mouth soon transformed the young, self-taught engineer into something of a local hero. By the late 1920s, a number of influential names had joined Peoples in lobbying Governor Angus McLean to release Williams early: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Sheriff McGeachy, and reportedly even Deputy Pate’s widow. On September 29, 1929, almost eight years after his conviction, David Marshall Williams was pardoned.

The Winchester Repeating Arms Company hired Williams after he was released, but corporate life proved almost more arduous to him than prison. Paranoid that his colleagues would steal his ideas and feeling stifled in the bureaucratic environment, Williams became a raving hothead who stormed out of meetings and threatened his colleagues when he felt ignored or underappreciated. Winchester considered firing him but recognized that, despite his tantrum-throwing antics, Williams was still a genius.

When the U.S. Ordnance Department requested designs for a “light rifle” prototype, Winchester submitted a semiautomatic carbine that incorporated Williams’s short-stroke piston concept, making the rifle more compact and reliable. The military had already been impressed by Williams’s floating chamber (another invention he conceived while inside Caledonia), which enabled weapons meant for .30- and .45-caliber ammunition to fire .22 ammo during training. This might not sound terribly exciting, but it saved the War Department millions of dollars, since the .22s were smaller and cheaper.

On October 1, 1941, Winchester officially received word that it had won the contract for the M1 carbine. An estimated eight million M1s
were produced during World War II and the Korean War, more than any other American small arm. General Douglas MacArthur is quoted as heralding the M1 as “one of the strongest contributing factors in our victory in the Pacific.”

By the time Williams died at the age of seventy-four, he had been credited with dozens of patents and earned numerous awards and tributes. In 1952 the feature film
Carbine Williams
, starring Jimmy Stewart, was released, and a state marker was erected near Williams’s Ogden home that says: “1900–1975, ‘Carbine’ Williams, designer of short-stroke piston, which made possible M-1 carbine rifle, widely used in WWII.” And in 1968 ex-felon Williams was made an honorary deputy U.S. marshal.

There may be more examples, but after an exhaustive search I could find only two other inmates in American history who created significant innovations while serving time. In the spring of 1921, a convict at Leavenworth’s maximum-security penitentiary designed a new type of adjustable wrench (patent 1,413,121), and about sixty-five years later in a Texas prison, a convicted pot grower named Jason Lariscey developed a method for cutting Kevlar that facilitated the mass production of bulletproof helmets for U.S. troops.

Lieutenant Daryl Williams and I climb the stairs out of the old metal shop and return to the main entrance. I thank him for my tour and ask if, on the way out, I can pick some souvenir patches of cotton, which are beyond the gates but still technically on the prison’s property. He doesn’t see why it should be a problem. “I just don’t want to get shot or anything,” I tell him.

After visiting Caledonia, I had planned on passing through a town called Franklinton just outside of Raleigh to find the unmarked spot where the famed boxer Jack Johnson died. On June 10, 1946, Johnson was refused service at a local diner because he was black, and he sped off in a rage and skidded around a corner too fast, hurtling his car into a tree. Physically and historically, Johnson was a giant. Born to slaves, he became boxing’s first African American heavyweight world
champion in 1908. When he creamed former champion James Jeffries, who’d come out of retirement to (in his words) “demonstrate that a white man is the king of them all,” race riots erupted in twenty-five states and caused at least two dozen deaths. In 1912, Johnson became the first person convicted under the Mann Act, which prohibited “transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes.” The lady in question was Lucille Cameron, Johnson’s soon-to-be-wife. That she happened to be white and a prostitute didn’t help his case or public image. Cameron refused to testify, but an old flame named Belle Schreiber—also a white prostitute Johnson had traveled with—agreed to work with prosecutors, and Johnson fled the country. He returned seven years later and spent almost a year in prison after surrendering himself at the United States/Mexico border.

As epic as Johnson’s life was, I’ve decided I’m not going to Franklinton. Right before arriving in North Carolina, I had a minor anxiety attack upon realizing that I’d burned through the majority of my allotted budget and estimated schedule, despite being only halfway through my itinerary. Time to pick up the pace and resist the urge to follow every potential lead. Franklinton will have to wait.

For the record, though, Jack Johnson’s story wasn’t entirely irrelevant. He was the guy who invented a new kind of adjustable wrench while imprisoned at Leavenworth.

ON APRIL 10, 1790
, Congress passed the first U.S. Patent Act, granting inventors legal protection over their creations. All blueprints and, if possible, working models had to be approved by a three-man board, and the original members of this triumvirate were no run-of-the-mill bureaucrats: Secretary of War Henry Knox, U.S. Attorney General Edmund Randolph, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson reviewed every proposal.

Samuel Hopkins received America’s first patent in 1790, and, somewhat naïvely, I’d hoped that his accomplishment had gone unmarked. No such luck. A tribute to him was erected long ago in Pittsford, Vermont. It reads:

Hopkins’s innovation was regional in scope, and I was curious about inventions that had impacted society as a whole in even more dramatic and far-reaching ways.

Maybe, I thought, America’s
second
patent would prove more scintillating. While futzing around on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s website, I typed (per their instructions) “0000002” into the database, and up cropped information about a loomlike mechanism for “manufacturing wool or other fibrous materials” that made pearl ash seem riveting in comparison.

Before signing off, I spotted something peculiar: the file date for patent number two was listed as July 29, 1836. That couldn’t be right.
Certainly forty-six years hadn’t passed between America’s first two patents.