Saloon Tour - Escapee Drinks

“Saturday afternoon about 4 or 4:30 o’clock every prisoner in the Collin County Jail made his escape,” opens the Democrat newspaper article. On October 13, 1898, while the sheriff was in Dallas, prisoners A.P. Ritchie and Jim Lawrence led the breakout by breaking down an iron door and using it to gouge out one of the stones under a window sill. It took them two hours to get the hole big enough to escape. Ritchie was the last of the prisoners to leave. It was reported that he through the court house to Malone’s saloon where he drank a glass of beer and asked how to get to the post office. The officers discovered the escape around dinner time and offered a $25 reward for each return prisoner. At the time of the article only two prisoners had been caught, not including Ritchie and Lawrence, but the officer had confidence they would be captured soon.