GREEN COVE SPRINGS – Children living and growing up at the jail was routine for the 80 years at the building along State Road 16 that served as the lockup for Clay County law-breakers.

The tenancy of Chief Deputy Will Knight’s family was the longest at more than 17 years. The four youngest of the six children, daughters Nita and Jerry and the twin boys, Bobby and Billy, were born in the jailer’s residence.

The girls came into the world upstairs. The twins sang their first squalling duet on the first floor because sometime in between the warden’s quarter were expanded and remodeled.

WPA financed and provided the labor for a new larger jail and the quarters for the jailer expanded into the front frame and brick veneer structure facing Gratio Street. except for the booking and dispatch room on the northeast corner.

For the Knight children and their friends, the jail was a playground. They wandered the corridors conversing with prisoners in their cells. The boys, full of mischief, on occasion carried the large brass key that opened all the locks and was supposed to hang on a nail just inside the kitchen door.

The prisoners were mostly good men who worked hard all week then lost the battle with demon rum on the weekend. Inmates baby sat the children, cooked in the family kitchen and helped wrangle the heavy iron pots and water buckets to wash the laundry in the yard.

The school was just across the street and only a short walk home for lunch. One of the Knight cousins sought to take advantage of this when he fled through a window and dashed to the jail expecting Uncle Will to save him from a whipping.

Little did he know that his mama, Mrs. Knight’s sister was visiting at the time. Suddenly, Uncle Will made himself scarce. His mother met him at the curb and tanned his backside then marched him back to school and supervised while the teacher delivered her own discipline.

Now, Will Knight was both feared and respected all over the county but he wasn’t about to get in his sister-in-law’s business.

Come the weekends, the Knight children were bundled into bed but they never knew who they might wake up with. It was not unusual for the occasional father in the grips of the Devil’s brew to have their own kids sleeping in the back seat. Chief Deputy Knight locked the fathers up and bundled the kids into bed with his own.

In the mid-forties the Knight family moved into a nearby house and the Martins, new arrivals to the county, took up residence at the jail. Daughter, Grace Martin in high school and a little shy was not looking forward to the challenge of making new friends. All that changed when classmates welcomed her and local football hero George Carlisle caught her eye. He was immediately smitten.

They courted through high school and gregarious George took great pleasure in announcing he was going to the jail to pick up his date. After they married, George went off to World War II and Grace continued to live with her parents at the jail. Carlisle went on to serve as Clay County Clerk of the Court with Grace at his side for the next 32 years.

That old jail has served Clay County in many ways. Rarely does one think of it as a place to raise children, but it was.