WETHERSFIELD - It’s about 7 p.m. on Wednesday at Wethersfield’s Keeney Cultural Center and Frank Wimiarski is decked out in full prison guard’s uniform, giving a tour.

       He’s done that many times--mostly around the Old Wethersfield DMV area, where the Connecticut State Prison stood for 140 years--but tonight he has a lot less space to show. Wimiarski is manning an 8-foot by 5-foot prison cell, and people are eagerly filing in and out.

       â€�"You would use the stool to write letters to the family,” Wimiarski tells one man, pointing to the piece of furniture standing next to a small wooden desk. â€�"Anybody who has claustrophobia wouldn’t like it in here.”

       Some seemed to. When Gina Purcaro sat on the cell’s cot with her father, Todd, she described it as â€�"comfortable”.

       â€�"I don’t think you want this as your room,” said Wethersfield Historical Society Curator Rachel Zilinsky with a laugh.

       This is a reconstructed prison cell from the former state prison, and it is just one piece of a comprehensive new exhibit newly launched by the Wethersfield Historical Society. Walk into the first floor Keeney Cultural Center room and you’ll find relics from the facility that include documents, pictures, and other tidbits of history.

       At the exhibit’s opening reception Wednesday night, the prison cell--shipped to Coventry when the prison was demolished in 1967 and offered to Wethersfield in 2000 when the town’s own facility was being updated--was the main attraction, with attendees snapping photographs of friends and family members posing from behind bars.

       You might never see happier mug shots, but historical enthusiasts might have been more reluctant to, if they had the chance, even, sit on the second most popular component of the exhibit--the electric chair that was used at the facility to execute 18 inmates between 1932 and the prison’s closing.

       â€�"They were going to do another one, but he got a reprieve an hour before the execution,” Wimiarski said. â€�"This was a more severe punishment than hanging because they gave you 2,000 volts of electricity.”

       Three times.

       â€�"They would do it once and then a second time,” he said. â€�"Then a third time for good measure.”

       And if that doesn’t make you want to steer clear of it.

       â€�"There’s some scratch marks from finger nails,” Wimiarski said, pointing to the arms of the chair.

       Exhibit goers cannot even touch the electric chair, let alone sit in it--it’s encased in a glass display near another case that contains guards’ shoes, the sponge they would use to rinse the shaved heads of prisoners preparing to be executed and the hat that they would put on immediately afterward.

       And the prison cell? That has a more direct connection to the chair-the reconstructed unit is 1 of 20 that made up the facility’s segregation ward. This area was reserved for inmates that had â€�"privileges revoked”, as well as those on death row, according to Wimiarski.

       â€�"Joseph Taborsky was in one of these cells,” he said.

       Connecticut history buffs might know him as â€�"The Mad Dog Killer.” He murdered six people in a string of robberies in the 1950s before being put to death at the state prison.

       â€�"I don’t know if it was this one,” Wimiarski adds.