Follow the River: On The Road to Moundsville, West Virginia

Interior, WV State Penitentiary

On the final day of our October road trip, we spent the afternoon in Moundsville, West Virginia. The first stop was the West Virginia State Penitentiary. While waiting for our tour to begin, I looked at a display of old newspaper clippings about the filming of Fools’ Parade, which was based on Davis Grubb’s novel of the same title. The 1971 movie, filmed on location in Moundsville, starred Jimmy Stewart, George Kennedy, Anne Baxter, William Windom, and Kurt Russell, and it must’ve been a very big deal to have Hollywood come to Moundsville. The articles included photographs of the movie stars in town during the filming, but what really caught my attention was a paragraph near the end of one article: Before the excitement of the movie production, only three copies of Grubb’s book had been sold locally. After the filming, 3400 copies were sold in Moundsville.

Cell Block, WV State Penitentiary

The prison offers a haunted tour each year around Halloween, but we wanted to go on the regular tour. Reality was scary enough. In fact, I’m pretty convinced that if I were locked up in one of those 5’x7’ cells, as the inmates were with at least one and sometimes two cellmates, I’d be rioting at the first opportunity. If an inmate wasn’t an animal the day he was incarcerated, he most certainly was after a few hours on the inside. This penitentiary seemed far worse than Alcatraz (which I’ve also toured). Our guide told us that the cell block pictured above, temperatures could reach 120 degrees on the top tier in summer, and in winter the average temperature on the bottom tier was a damp 40 degrees. The penitentiary was finally closed in 1995, after the small cells and conditions were deemed cruel and inhuman punishment by the West Virginia Supreme Court. Evidently one woman on our tour did not agree with that decision since at nearly every stop on the tour she proclaimed “and that’s the way it should still be today.” I’m against the death penalty, but by the end of the 90-minute tour, which concludes in an area where the electric chair is on exhibit, she had nearly changed my mind. By that point I was hoping they’d let her sit in Old Sparky.

Cell Graffiti, WV State Penitentiary

Davis Grubb was not a favorite son of Moundsville, and described himself as “the sore thumb on the hand of the town” in a conversation with Norman Julian (scroll down to the second essay by Julian, via the website of Meredith Sue Willis). Our prison tour guide stressed that the inmates Davis had based characters on were highly fictionalized and that the real convicts were the hardest of criminals. He was especially critical of Fools’ Parade, where ex-convict Mattie Appleyard is set up by the town’s banker, prison guard, and sheriff (Jimmy Stewart played the role of Mattie Appleyard in the film).

After leaving the penitentiary, we went looking for Davis Grubb’s childhood home. In the foreword to the Appalachian Echoes edition of Fools’ Parade (published by the University of Tennessee Press), fiction editor Thomas E. Douglass describes Davis as traumatized by the loss of the family home after his father had remortgaged it to obtain a business loan. The family was evicted just before Christmas in 1934 after the loan was defaulted. Douglass writes of Grubb’s childhood home: “It was an idyllic life, living in the large rambling two-story frame house at 318 Seventh Street, mere blocks away from the river and the train tracks that ran along its banks, not far from the Indian burial mounds, for which the town was named. The house was also near the West Virginia State Penitentiary and the Strand Theater, other places that would become firmly fixed in his imagination . . . . He carried a photo of the house with him throughout his life . . . . On his way to school, young Davis walked past the oldest structure in town, the Adena Indian burial mounds . . . and the West Virginia State Penitentiary, one of the oldest in the nation, built in 1866 like a gray granite castle. Walking by the prison’s twenty-four-foot-high wall, four-feet thick, Grubb did not fear those inside nor the possibility of their escape, but rather felt sorry for the inmates, who were cut off from life and separated from their families. Grubb once wrote ‘[I]n the innocence and confusion of my child’s brain, the great mound and the penitentiary were bound together in ambiguous and dreadful brotherhood. One was the burial place of the unknown dead; the other of the unknown living’ [in “The Valley of the Ohio,” 56].”

The Grave Creek burial mound is directly across the street from the penitentiary. As I mentioned in an earlier post, both can be seen from the nearby elementary school. Our itinerary following the penitentiary tour included a stop at the Grave Creek Mound Archaeological Complex. And, to end the day on a light note, we visited the Marx Toy Museum, where we indulged memories of our own childhood imaginations while looking at displays that included some of our own favorite toys, as well as a few we dreamed of but are still waiting to receive.


News and Updates:
Lee Maynard’s newest book The Pale Light of Sunset has just been published by the West Virginia University Press. Read a review by Cat Pleska at Meredith Sue Willis’ blog and listen to a podcast interview with Lee at WV Writers, Inc.



Photo Credits
Top photo: WV State Penitentiary Interior, copyright 2009 by Dory Adams
Middle photo: Cell Block, copyright 2009 by Dory Adams
Bottom photo: Cell Graffiti, copyright 2009 by Kevin Scanlon, used by permission

Moundsville, West Virginia: Hometown of Davis Grubb

We took the long way to Roanoke, Virginia last October when we were driving to an event there as part of our fall vacation. Our first stop was Moundsville, West Virginia to take a look at the prison, an impressive gothic fortress which takes up several blocks in a residential neighborhood. I was intrigued by what it might be like to grow up with a 19^th century maximum security prison in your back yard. It was in use up until the end of the 20^th century and looks sinister even in the daylight, and if I were a child trying to fall asleep at night with that looming outside my bedroom window I’m sure I’d have some pretty terrifying nightmares.

But wait, it gets better. Across the street, directly in front of the penitentiary, is the Indian Mound that the town is named for, and just beyond the Indian Mound is the elementary school. Not only would I be unable to sleep, I’d be afraid to walk past them on the way to school. And since I spent most of my own school days gazing out the windows and daydreaming, I know the prison and Indian burial mound would be huge distractions since both can be seen from the front windows of the school.

As we drove further on that day along the Ohio River, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to grow up in that town, telling my husband it would be the perfect place to turn an imaginative kid into a writer. Later, when listening to a CD set of Kate Long’s radio series “In Their Own Country,” I learned that writer Davis Grubb had grown up in Moundsville. Grubb wrote several novels, including Night of the Hunter, which was made into a 1955 movie with gorgeous black-and-white cinematography. Charles Laughton directed and James Agee wrote the screenplay. If you’ve never seen it, you must. Robert Mitchum plays a nasty bad guy of the nightmare sort, an escaped convict posing as a preacher. And if you’ve never heard Kate Long’s "In Their Own Country" radio series, see if you can track down a copy which includes 14 CDs, each with wonderful interviews and a focus on a different West Virginia writer. Taylor Books in Charleston, WV -- which is one of my all time favorite book stores -- had several copies in stock last fall, and you may be able to order it through them.

Leaving Moundsville behind, we continued our journey and crossed the river at Sistersville, West Virginia to Fly, Ohio simply because we wanted to ride on the tiny car ferry we’d watched from the riverbank. Later that same day, we also stopped at Point Pleasant, WV so that we could look at the Mothman statue and take a walk along the river where the Silver Bridge once stood. We were due in Ashland, Kentucky that night, where we’d booked a hotel with a view of a steel mill, but from there our plans were intentionally vague for the next three days until we were due in Roanoke on Friday morning. The mill at Ashland, AK Steel Works, looked pretty impressive shooting flames high into the air against the night sky, and I was surprised to find that I’d forgotten how a working blast furnace sounds.

After a night in the shadow of the steel mill and some early dawn industrial photography we traveled on (OK, it was Kevin who got up before daybreak to photograph the mill while I slept, but I now regret my priorities), stopping to photograph things of interest: mountaintop removal coal mines, railroads, a vintage 1950s style amusement park and other roadside attractions. In White Sulphur Springs we splurged on lunch at the Greenbrier Hotel, where I had the best fried green tomato sandwich I’ve ever tasted, and by the time we arrived in Roanoke we’d listened to most of the CDs from “In Their Own Country.”

My coworkers tend to bring back the usual pictures of white sand beaches and sparkling blue water from their vacations, but I return with photographs of ravaged mountains, industrial wastelands, monster statues, and 19^th century prisons, not to mention notes and ideas for more stories than I can find time to write. Those coworkers of mine seem to always be interested in where I’m going on my next trip, and they always want to see my photographs when I get back. They’re already asking about what’s on the vacation agenda for this fall, but I’m wondering what stories and images I’ll discover that aren’t even part of the plan.

Photo Credits

Top Photo: Moundsville Penitentiary, copyright (c) 2008 Dory Adams

Middle and Bottom Photos: Moundsville Penitentiary, copyright (c) 2008 Kevin Scanlon, used by permission