A Peek into Summers County’s Past: Rare view of local depot

SUMMERS COUNTY W.Va. (Hinton News) – Editor’s Note: Each week, local history collector William Jones discusses items from his collection and their historical significance. In this edition of A Peek into Summers County’s Past, Jones reveals a rare photo of the interior of a local train depot during its prime.

I am going to start throwing in a photograph like the one you see of the interior of the Pence Springs Depot. I don’t know a great deal about these photographs, other than some basic facts like this rare view of inside a local depot that is historically significant due to it being such an unusual photo of the time.

In all of my years of collecting Summers County historical items, I have never seen another photo of the interior of a local depot other than the Hinton Depot. I have seen numerous photos of the depots in Talcott, Lowell and others but never an interior view.

This particular photo depicts an unidentified railroad employee and Andrew Gormley. Andrew is the gentleman to the right and has ties to Dennis and Francis Lahey, who had the Lahey Boarding House that sat close to the train station in Pence Springs. Suzann Humphrey allowed me to scan her early photos of Pence Springs many years ago, and this was one of them.

Her mother, Margaret (Gormley) Tolley, and her parents, Andrew (the gentleman in this photo) and Pauline (Lahey) Gormley. Pauline’s parents were the aforementioned Dennis and Francis Lahey. They had six other children, and the family would stay at the boarding house when they were in Pence Springs visiting.

Margaret’s parents died during the Spanish Flu between 1918 and 1919. Her mother died first, and Margaret was raised by her Lahey family and lived in the boarding house. Her father died of the flu close to the end of the pandemic. Based on these facts, we can deduce that this photo of him was taken in the 1910s or, better said, “pre-pandemic,” while they were in Pence Springs visiting their Lahey family.

The photo of the two unidentified ladies is in the front yard of the boarding house. They are most likely two of the Lahey sisters. The large two-story building in the right corner of the photo is the Rhodes Store and Post Office, which I have discussed in one of my previous pieces. The smaller house you see to its left is the old toll house. It was here where fees to cross the bridge that first spanned the Greenbrier River ca. 1905 were collected. The house still stands today, has been restored, and is used as a summer camp. The depot is out of view in this photo to the right.

Be sure to check back next week for another edition of A Peek into Summers County’s Past. If you have a story from the area’s past to share, send an email to news@hintonnews.com.