During Cimarron's wild and bawdy boom days, the town was badly in need of a jail to house some of the more violent characters and in the fall of 1872, construction began on this stone building. At one time, the building was surrounded by an outer stone wall that was 10 feet high and 4 feet thick. Though the wall is long gone, parts of the foundation can still be seen. The southeast corner of the structure once housed a small sheriff's office. In the early 1900s, an inmate tried to escape, leaving a huge gap in the outer wall from a dynamite blast. The jail continued to be used until the early 1960s.