KATIE: The Occoquan Workhouse in Lorton began through progressive era ideals during the Roosevelt administration.

The idea of having inmates be rehabilitated through hard work, fresh air, wholesome living conditions.

And in 1910, they took the first 29 inmates, and they basically had to live in tents until they constructed the prison.

It became a self-sustaining agricultural work camp, so they had a dairy farm, they had hogs, they raised all the crops they needed to feed their animals.

Lucy Burns, the namesake of our museum, she was a suffragist, fighting for a very long time for this equal right to be able to vote.

Lucy was a co-founder of the National Woman's Party with Alice Paul.

Lucy and Alice had very strong tactics that other suffragists weren't using, and one was picketing the White House.

These were the first people ever, in the history of our government, to picket the White House.

Eventually, they started having to serve jail time because these women never stopped.

Alice Paul had been sitting in the D.C. jail for quite some time, and so Lucy and a number of the other women protested the treatment of Alice Paul.

They were then arrested, this was November 15th, 1917.

They were brought to the Occoquan Workhouse, it was not the first time these women had been brought down here.

And when they got here, they demanded to be treated as political prisoners.

They didn't want to do the work of the other inmates at the Workhouse, and so they were treated horribly.

Lucy had her arms shackled above her head for the entire night, and then the women decided they would do a hunger strike in solidarity with Alice to protest the treatment that they were receiving.

And so, some of the women, including Lucy, were force-fed.

Once the press got a hold of the information and people started learning how these women were being treated, is when they were released.

The night of terror and the publicity that their treatment gained, really is seen as a turning point in the suffrage movement.

So, the Occoquan Workhouse goes through a variety of changes over the years.

It continues to get bigger and bigger, encompassing over 3,000 acres.

A cell block was added in the late '70s, early '80s, and initially, they were never meant to be anything more than single occupancy.

But due to overcrowding, when you look at the cells, you'll see that most of them have bunk beds because they were doubling up the inmates.

And so, by the '80s and '90s, you had lots of violence, lots of escapes, lots of uprisings and riots, and not enough funds.

And in the mid-'90s, Congress decided that it needed to be closed.

And then there was a group of really interested community members who wanted to turn this into an art center.

And thus, the Workhouse Art Center was born.

RACHEL: We have a community of about 60 different artists here, and we have nine different gallery spaces.

When you go through the art studios now, each of those studios used to be, uh, jail blocks and jail cells.

And the quad facility, where you can walk around the grass, was something that used to have fences blocked off.

I think there's something really beautiful about taking a space that was heavy and restrictive for our communities and turning it into something that celebrates creativity, that celebrates a sense of freedom.

CHRIS: It's a way to redeem the past of this place, to really make it into a lively, functioning, artistic community.

One really has that creative synergy that takes place.

RACHEL: I think art absolutely brings people together.

I think it's something that we do that makes us get outside of our usual routines and get outside of our usual thought patterns.

And when we can do that in community with each other, it only brings people together.