History
It was named in 1841 by Charles Wilkes during the United States Exploring Expedition in honor of Captain William Henry McNeill of the Hudson's Bay Company. McNeill was at Fort Nisqually in 1841 and greeted Wilkes upon arrival in southern Puget Sound.
The Robert A. Inskip expedition of 1846 named the island Duntze, after Captain John A. Duntze of the Royal Navy. In 1847, during the British map reorganization project, Henry Kellett restored the earlier name McNeil.
The United States government bought land on McNeil Island in 1870 and opened a federal penitentiary there in 1875. By 1937 the federal government, which had been accumulating parcels of land adjacent to the penitentiary, had purchased all the land on the island and compelled its last residents to leave. The federal penitentiary's most famous inmates were probably Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz," who was held there from 1909 to 1912; Charles Manson, who was an inmate from 1961 to 1966 for trying to cash a forged government check; and Alvin Karpis, who was an inmate until 1971 for operating as point man for Ma Barker's gang in the 1930s. Karpis was the only person arrested by J. Edgar Hoover, and was released soon after Hoover died.
Washington state took over the penitentiary from the federal government in 1981. It is now called McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC). Since Washington was not a state when the prison was formed, it has been a territorial, federal, and state prison.
Read more about this topic: McNeil Island
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“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)