A Peek into Summers County’s Past: Maddy Grocery

PENCE SPRINGS W.Va. (Hinton News) – This is the only photograph I have ever uncovered of Maddy Grocery in Pence Springs. It was located in what later became the Pence Springs Post Office building. This photo was taken in 1957 and shows where gasoline was also sold there.

At that time and before it was very common for small convenience stores to have a gas pump in front of their establishment. I can think of 6 small stores in Pence Springs during the 1920s up till the 1970s and they all had a gas pump.

Maddy Grocery was owned by the late Robert “Shirley” Maddy and Adena R. Garten Maddy. I have referenced members of the Garten family in several of my past articles, especially in ones in relation to Pence Springs.

In gathering information I spoke with their son, Ashby Maddy, a retired state policeman. He said that his father Shirley built the building in the early 1950s for both Maddy Grocery and the Pence Springs Post Office.

It wasn’t a grocery store in terms of Kroger or Walmart today, but it sold the staples/necessities that would tide you over till you went to Alderson or Hinton once a month for groceries. He remembered being in the service in Korea and writing back home to his mother at the post office. He said he simply put his name “Ashby Maddy mother Pence Springs, W.Va.” And it made it to Adena from Korea just like that!

This was before the days of having to have a zip code on every piece of mail to get it to a specific location. It is hard enough to imagine mail arriving like that locally addressed like that today. But especially all the way from Korea!

His mother retired after 28 years of being the postmaster of Pence Springs. He remembered gasoline being 15 cents in the early days of Maddy Grocery. That is a far cry from the average of $3.06 a gallon today. The store closed in the mid to late 1960s. The post office remained in the same building until closing in 2011 which made Talcott the closest post office for Pence Springs.