The death penalty was carried out in Iowa at Fort Madison only. It was never done at Anamosa. There is no evidence that any executions ever took place here.
Numerous inmates were sentenced to Anamosa to face the gallows, but all either had their convictions overturned, reduced to years, or were transferred to Fort Madison before their date with the hangman.
In the early years, Anamosa was the penitentiary serving the northern part of Iowa, while Fort Madison served the south. The law provided that the sheriff of the sentencing county would serve as executioner, to be conducted at Anamosa or Fort Madison. But it never happened here, for the reasons cited above.
"I ran across a reference some years ago that if a hanging were to take place here, it would have been conducted in the small yard of the Female Department, which was walled off from the main male prison quarters. Less chance of an execution being seen by the inmate population I suppose."
After 1907, the Reformatory was designated the prison for younger, first-time offenders. Persons sentenced to die would never have been placed here.
Iowa is no longer a death penalty state. The last execution in Iowa took place in 1963 when a federal inmate at Ft. Madison, Victor Feguer, was hanged. The death penalty was abolished in Iowa in 1965.