Moundsville, Part III, Prison Part B

The next part of the tour took us around the prison and into the more recent of the various wings. And by "recent", we're still talking about a pretty decrepit, old, and ratty section of the prison. One thing about this place is that it was COLD! The day was sunny and warm, but that damned place was frigid! The tour guide had warned us to bring coats, so we had. It was a good thing, too. She did tell us that in the summer it was every bit as hot in there as it was cold during the winter months. In summer the temperatures in that building would hover as high as 108 degrees. In winter as cold inside as it was outside. I cannot imagine being incarcerated in that shit hole.


This was one of the first actual cells we saw. I was stunned at how small they were. About seven feet by four feet.

This was a part of the prison for especially violent prisoners. There was an even more exclusive section of four cells where they always kept the four most dangerous men in the prison. That section is where the top two (Avengers Motorcycle Club members) were murdered by Aryan Brotherhood members (one of the Avengers was stabbed thirty-seven times).

Our guide telling us gruesome stories of the violence that ran like a current through that place. It's at times like this that I wonder why I think my supernatural horror stories can hold a candle to the horrors that men perpetrate on one another.

Another cafeteria. There were several in the prison.

If you'll look at the link for the Jimmy Stewart movie that I posted yesterday you will see a scene with this contraption in it. This was a cage that moved people from three different sections of the prison into the main holding tank. This was a really well engineered contraption that, despite its weight, was easily swiveled with no effort by our guide. I got into it and experienced the brief ride. There were only two like this on Earth--this one and one in the UK.

A totally abandoned part o the prison. Not even on the tour. I saw it while I was on the turnaround and took a quick shot.

Yet another part of this nightmare of a building. If there are ghosts, whatever walks here walks in droves.

This is definitely one place I would NOT want to be at night with the lights out.

Yep. The prison had its own post office. This was the main window.

Out in the grimy yard. One place that's not on the tour are the guard towers. These are, of course, the places I'd most like to see.

At one time this bathroom in the prison yard was private. But a prisoner had his face sliced off in there for being a smartass. They put his face back on and moved him to another prison where he was promptly carved up again. (Apparently he had a knack for cutting remarks.) After his face was sliced off they took the walls down on the toilets so no one could do that again. At least not in private.

This was the part where they locked us in the cell. I did not like this, at all. The cells were very, very small and I'd have certainly gone mad if cooped up in there for hours.

Our guide on the second floor closing off the cells by remote control.

Then it was into the small prison museum. There were two interesting things in the small museum. One was "Old Sparky", the electric chair. It was used to kill nine inmates. The thing was built by a prison inmate who had been a skilled carpenter before being incarcerated. After he built it they had to send him to another prison because the other prisoners had placed a death warrant on his head for building it for the warden.

And this was the other interesting artifact in the museum: A hand-written letter from Charles Manson to the warden of the prison. Manson was from the area (his mom had been an inmate in that very prison--as had a number of his other close relatives), and he wanted to be transferred from California to the West Virginia Pen. The warden told him "when Hell freezes over". I don't know why Manson would have wanted to be there, though. The place was a travesty. Hot, cold, filthy, ultra-violent, crawling with rats and roaches, old, leaky...I just don't get it.

After that, we were driving back toward North Bend, taking time to stop and look at the Ohio River from the Ohio side. All in all, it was a really good day of looking at some amazing American history.

Moundsville Part II, (Touring the Prison, Part A)

West Virginia Penitentiary was once considered the most violent prison in the USA. Which is one hell of a statement. During its last years in service the place was one big turf war between The Avengers motorcycle club and the Aryan Brotherhood. Yeah, it was pretty damned rough. The worst of the fighting stopped when the two top Avengers gang members were stabbed to death, thus putting an end to the struggle. (This was just a bit of the information I picked up while on the tour.)

The prison is about 140 years old. It's a really foreboding structure, intentionally created to appear as intimidating and uncomfortable as possible. Its outer walls were constructed of sandstone blocks mined and hacked out by the prisoners who were to inhabit the building upon its completion. Thus began a truly hideous bit of American history.

They filmed the Jimmy Stewart/George Kennedy/Strother Martin film FOOLS' PARADE in and around the prison in 1971. You can see the first ten minutes and forty-five seconds of the movie here. Kurt Russell was also in it...he was around 17 at the time.

One of the first things on display where you pay admission for the tour is this old style machine gun, which was part of the security landscape at the prison for some time.

This was our guide in the prison. I think her name was Doris. She did a really good job.

The relatively modern room where inmates spoke with visitors. Since the prison was so old, it was constantly being upgraded when possible. Upgrades were obvious in some of the much older parts of the prison.

Wherever prisoners had to pass, there were generally armed guards with the ability to fire their weapons through bars and grills. This was about as bright and inviting an area that we saw while in the prison.

There were paintings throughout the prison. All of the art was produced by inmates. This room had been converted into a cafeteria where inmates could dine with their families. Since there were always children about, all of the art in this room were fantasy and cartoon oriented.

This was one of the main cafeterias. This place was strictly segregated by the inmates. One end was all-white. The other end was strictly black. Hispanics could use the area in the middle. (No, I'm not making this shit up.)

More inmate art. The art was done right over the concrete walls. The fellow who did this one (and many others) was color blind. Another inmate would mix the colors for him and he would do the paintings.

Then we were out of the prison and into the central yard area. If possible, this part of the prison was uglier than the inside.

When this gate was built, it was horse-drawn wagons that came and went. The doors that locked it down were of steel and weighed fourteen tons. (They're still in there.) This must have been a frustrating sight for the inmates who were able to look through that door into the outside world from time to time. It was heavily guarded and armed to the teeth. Anyone trying to escape through there would have been cut to pieces by gunfire.

Then we were headed through more gates and fences and into the main section of the prison where most of the prisoners were housed.

Tomorrow: Part III (and B).

Moundsville, Part I

The day after the bike ride I wanted to drive up toward Moundsville which is about 70 miles from North Bend State Park. There were two places I wanted to see in Moundsville itself: one was the huge Indian mound for which the city is named, and the second was the closed West Virginia Penitentiary which is also located in the town. The prison has been shut for almost fifteen years and they offer tours of the abandoned facility. So I wanted to do that.

The sky was overcast when we got up so we quickly decided that a trip to Moundsville was the ticket. We keyed in the city on our Tom Tom and headed out. The drive over was really good, taking us across the Ohio River and into the state of Ohio. I hate to say it, but you can almost tell the difference between Ohio and West Virginia just by crossing that river. Whatever the reason, there seems to be less poverty in Ohio and the people who are poor seem to care more about their homes than the same kind of folk in West Virginia. I'm not making a judgment, just an observation.

We saw lots of those small-time oil wells all along the way. Both on the West Virginia side of the river and in Ohio. In fact, the ones in Ohio seemed to be more in use than the ones on the east side of the river. There was also quite a lot of manufacturing going on in both states on either side of the Ohio River. All kinds of facilities from aluminum smelting to power stations to glass factories. I was surprised at the amount of enterprise around that area, considering the general state of the economy. We also noted a lot of road construction being done with stimulus money--each project had a large sign indicating that it was being done as part of the stimulus package from a few months back. So people were being put to work from that, also.

When we got to Moundsville, I was surprised at the size of the town. I'd thought that it was going to be a very small village, but instead I realized that it's a much larger place than I'd imagined. The roads were really busy, too, and there seemed to be no shortage of jobs. Not sure why, but that was my impression. As soon as we got our bearings, we stopped at a take-out Italian restaurant and ordered three stromboli--Andy got them to make him a vegetarian boli, but Carole and I had ones with meat. After that we drove right over to the Grave Creek Mound site where we had a tailgate lunch. And right away we saw that the prison was just across the street from the mound! So we weren't going to have any trouble at all finding that place.

After we'd eaten, we headed into the Mound complex, which includes a modern museum and laboratory where archaeologists work on preserving and cataloging the vast amounts of Native American artifacts that are drawn out of the ground there. I was amazed at the quality and the variations of the things that have been found at the site. The Indians who began the mound were part of what is now called the "Adena" culture. They were at work on that mound at about the same time that Julius Caesar was ruling Rome. Lewis & Clark made note of the mound complex on their way out west.

A working oil well. These small outfits pump the oil into tanks located on hillsides and which are drained by trucks from local oil firms who then resell the oil to larger outfits. From the state of some of the homes located around these wells, I'm left with the impression that they either don't produce much oil, or else the mineral rights to the wells are owned by someone other than the tenants. Many of these people with the oil wells are obviously grindingly poor.

The Grave Creek Mound Archeological Complex. This is an extremely nice facility. And the admission is free! This includes the extensive museum and the mound itself!

I took a number of photos of the working laboratory. They have a glass wall so that you can look in and see the archeologists at work on new artifacts.

This was an especially nice effigy found in the area.

The numbers and variety of the pipes on display was amazing! They have a couple of dozen pipes to see, and these were some of the more imaginative ones.

I was intrigued by this stone. A lot of Europeans made the claim that Native Americans had no written language. But this was, at the very least, not entirely true. I'm not sure what these lines represented, but they served as something perhaps like a written word to the culture that produced them.

My tiny family standing in front of the Grave Creek Mound. It's not the biggest burial mound I've ever seen, but it is a very nice one.

This modern walkway follows the earthen ramp that was a part of the mound created by its builders 2,000 years ago.

And here I was on the summit of the mound where there is a directional monument placed there in 1942.

And here is Andy sitting on the sandstone wall at the flat-topped area on the summit of the mound. Andy's allergies were acting up really terribly that day and the walk to the top was hard on his lungs.

This is the old, now abandoned museum that once held the artifacts pulled out of the mound and the nearby area. It's all boarded up now and the roof has caved in. But they've left it as just another artifact on the grounds.

Andy noticed that one of the trees near the base of the mound was producing burrs. I took a close look at the tree and suspect that it's a Chinese chestnut. But it could be an American chestnut. I meant to ask one of the rangers, but forgot to do that.

And this was the prison across the street from the mound complex. I'll cover our visit in there in my next couple of posts. It was a pretty strange and somewhat sobering tour.