PENCE SPRINGS W.Va. (WVDN) – I was recently talking to my cousin Lota Skaggs, who lives in Riverside Rest. She had told me this story before, but it is so neat and part of Summers County’s history, I just had to tell you about it. Not to mention, it would be unheard of today for this to happen with a school.
When Lota was a child, she attended the Pence Springs School from the 1st to the 8th grade. When she was in school there, there were four grades in each classroom for each of the two teachers. Mrs Oma Boyd taught 1st through 4th grades, and Mr. William Perdu taught 5th through 8th and was also the principal.
The school did not have a large enough freezer to store the meat for lunch. So it was stored at what was at that time the West Virginia State Prison for Women and later was returned to its previous glory as the Pence Springs Hotel by Ashby Berkley, a Pence Springs native.
Each week, Mr. Perdu would select students to go with him to bring the frozen food back to the school so Mrs. Lawrence and Mrs. Bremer could prepare lunch for the students. Mr. Perdu would select Lota and a few other students regularly to go with him to the prison weekly to go get the frozen food so the cooks would have it on hand to prepare.
She recalls one memory of getting to go to the prison vividly. There was one prisoner there who had murdered all of her family. And the school children found out about it. They would tell each other tales about it to scare each other if they knew the ones that were going that week.
She said the prisoners were all nice and very friendly. They got used to them coming each week and would have extra cookies, apples and oranges on hand for them to take back to the school to share with the other students. So it was always a treat for the kids to either get to go to the prison with Mr. Perdu or wait to see what they would bring back for everyone.
One other thing she remembers well was going to the Pence Springs School, which made her hate milk to this day. The school board had contracted with local dairies to supply the milk to the schools in the county. The milk that Pence Springs would receive is what the “old timers” referred to as “Blue John”, which is today skim milk.
The milk had the cream removed and was absent of butterfat. It had a slightly blue color to it, hence the name “Blue John”. She said it had an almost burnt taste and she could not stand it at the time. And that taste never left her and sticks in her mind 70-some years later. Ha
While on the subject of Pence Springs School and the prison. I remember the late Ashby Berkley talking about his days as a child in Pence Springs. His mother, Grace Berkley, was employed at the prison when he was a child.
If the prisoners had behaved and had a good record, they were allowed to go down over the hill from the prison where the flea market now is. Here they could play ball with Ashby and other children from the community. Solitary confinement was 4 cells on the 3rd floor on the flea market side. Note these cells are still in the building to this day and are one of the few reminders of the hotel’s days as a prison.
The prisoners in solitary confinement would watch the games from the window on the 3rd floor. They got so used to them that even though they had never physically met them, they “adopted” them. And during the times they were playing ball with the other prisoners, they had the children’s backs. None of the women would try to cheat, and if they did, they knew they had had it when they made their way back to the prison. Ha
