PENCE SPRINGS, W.Va. (Hinton News) – I have written about the Pence Springs Hotel on numerous occasions. This time, I will delve a little further into its history as the “West Virginia Prison for Women.” During the 1940s, the state of West Virginia allocated $45,000 to purchase and convert the Pence Springs Hotel property that had been closed since the Great Depression.
At that time, female prisoners were housed at the Moundsville Penitentiary, a maximum security prison for men. In 1947, after the state had completed the conversion of the facility into a women’s prison, two busloads of women and guards left Moundsville for Pence Springs. One of the buses wrecked along the way, and all of the women had to crowd on one bus to finish the venture to their new “home.”
After arriving, the prisoners found a much different environment than what they had been used to in Moundsville. All windows in the original hotel had bars installed over them. And round holes were cut in the room doors. They had flaps installed over them on the hallway side so the guards could flip them over and check on the inmates by looking into the room. An interesting note about the time Ashby Berkley converted the prison back into a hotel. He moved the flaps to the inside of the rooms so the guests could flip them back and look out into the hall. Just a quirky element from the prison days he repurposed for hotel guests.
The West Virginia Prison for Women closed in 1985 due to the building’s deterioration and the cost of repairs. The inmates were transferred to Pruntytown Correctional Center in Taylor County. The black-and-white photo you see here was taken during the property’s days as a prison in 1952.
I am not sure of the exact reason for this gathering, but I have been told that St Patrick Catholic Church in Hinton brought the children of Summers County to tour the prison. This photo was taken on the lawn near the bank that leads over the hill to the flea market. There is a very unusual aspect to this photo!
It appears the sunroom is in the background; in this case, it is on the right side of the building. There is one problem with this: the sunroom is on the left wing of the building, which was closed in when the building was completed in 1918. There was never a sunroom on the right side!
This was done from a “flopped negative”. Meaning “when a photographic negative is flipped backward (emulsion side up instead of emulsion side down) during printing or exposure to purposely reverse the image horizontally, it is commonly called a flopped negative or a flopped image.”
I am including an early postcard of the hotel. In this case, the card was used by the hotel for advertising in 1918, when it first opened. As you can see, the sunroom is on the left, and the right side is an open porch, just as it is today. If you have any photos or memories from when it was a prison, please email me at greenbrierantiques@gmail.com.
