Queensborough Author and History Professor, Clarence Jefferson Hall, Jr., Led a Tour Through Camp Gabriels: Sanitorium, College Campus, Prison
“I talk with students in my classes about what it means to leave something in the past versus what makes history,” said Associate Professor Clarence Jefferson Hall, Jr., Department of History. Hall, who teaches Environmental History, Carceral State, New York History, and Modern U.S. History at Queensborough, is the author of A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York’s North Country (2020 University of Massachusetts Press). He is currently preparing a book proposal on the history of Riker’s Island jail complex, but lately his mind is on the tour he led in mid-July at Camp Gabriels, a minimum-security men’s prison in upstate New York that has been shuttered for 17 years.
“If Camp Gabriels was a battlefield, it would be preserved as are the numerous battlefield sites located throughout New York state,” said Hall. This is the third such tour he has led through the Adirondack Architectural Heritage organization. “In many ways prisons are battlefields, both social and political. These institutions are a part of our culture and in some cases are monuments to history and should be available to everyone. I believe these tours help build empathy.”
Hall explained that peoples’s impressions of the prison system and what these places are like are mostly interpreted through movies and mainstream media and yet these institutions are not always one building with ominous watch towers. “Camp Gabriels, for example, is a complex of structures on a 160-acre site, including a church that was built in 1904. It was orginally used as a Tuberculosis sanitorium and then was part of Paul Smith’s College before being converted into a prison. There are buildings that once supported maple syrup production, and many decades ago, pheasants were raised on the property that were distributed in rural areas for hunters.”
Hall said, “What’s left of the prison is peeling paint, broken windows, and general deterioration. Artwork by prisoners has survived including a huge mural of the World Trade Center. And no bars or closed cells. The layout was an open format with dividers and bunk beds.”
Camp Gabriels was designated as a prison camp for non-violent inmates who were within two years of release and had jobs while they were there at the institution or in the community. The State Department of Correctional Services partnered with The Department of Environmental Conservation to use inmates for free labor, including trail maintenanace, camp site infrastructure, snow removal, flood control and soil conservation. Inmates also painted churches and public schools and refurbished offices.
“Unfortunately, most of the skills they developed in these rural settings were not easily transferable to potential jobs in New York City, where most of them were from. This became a contiruting factor to the very high percentage who returned to prison. The weight of conviction was very heavy indeed.”
As was the weight of the system on Hall’s family. His father, a correctional officer for 25 years who transported prisoners from Rikers Island to upstate New York, died ten years ago from suicide. “I want to better understand the psychiatric suffering, the terrible, chronic stress my dad experienced and to help build awareness about the mental health challenges of prison employees, not just the prisoners themselves. The places I’ve written about are places that touched my father, touched our family and touched my life in a very personal way.”
Hall gave a presentation on his visit to Camp Gabriels to The Correctional Association of New York (CANY) offices in Brooklyn, the oldest independent prison oversight organization in the state. As part of his presentation, he shared photographs from Camp Gabriels that had been taken in the early 1980’s and put on a slide carousel that had been discarded when the prison was shuttered and then pulled out of the trash by a Commissary Clerk.
“It’s easy to erase history,” said Hall, a 2025-27 member of CANY’s Advisory Council. “But history can be saved, even by just one person.”
Check out photos from the tour
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