Town uses former prison to escape hard times : Residents of Moundsville, W. Va., are hoping penitentiary’s notorious past will draw visitors, tourist dollars.

MOUNDSVILLE, W. Va. —  Citing deplorable living conditions in a “horrible dungeon,” the state Supreme Court in 1988 ordered the closure of the Civil War-era penitentiary on Moundsville’s main street, a decision that left the town in an economic funk.

The stone-walled, maximum-security prison, built by convicts in 1866, anchored the southern end of town like a medieval fortress. Although one of the nation’s most notorious lockups, the prison was viewed by those in Moundsville with a sort of affection: Its history was the town’s history, and its $8-million annual budget was a godsend to a region where coal mines were shutting down.

Last March, in the dead of night, the final group of prisoners was moved under heavy guard to a new, $68-million facility near Charleston--leaving behind cat-sized rats; unheated, double-bunk cells no bigger than a closet; broken pipes that occasionally spewed raw sewage; and the gallows and electric chair that took the lives of 94 inmates between 1899 and 1954.

Moundsville’s first plan was to turn the empty prison into a shopping mall. “I think they could find a better place to build a mall,” scoffed Robert Leach, 33, an inmate serving two life sentences for murder. “Given the pen’s history, I don’t know why the public would want anything to do it with.”

But Phil Remke, 41, who grew up four blocks from the prison and runs the furniture store his grandfather founded, thought that very history--the inmate uprising in 1986 that attracted national attention, the hangings that townspeople watched in the 1930s from bleachers on Eighth Street--might indeed captivate the public and provide a much-needed source of revenue.

After all, he reasoned, Alcatraz attracts a million visitors a year, making it one of San Francisco’s most popular tourist attractions. And Moundsville’s penitentiary had already gained a certain prominence as the setting for two Hollywood films: “The Night of the Hunter,” starring Robert Mitchum (1955) and “Fool’s Parade,” with Jimmy Stewart and George Kennedy (1971).

Five former corrections officers were recruited as tour guides, and 60 volunteers joined Remke to form an economic council to revive the town. Since last summer, nearly 20,000 people have toured the ghostly cell blocks, at $5 a visit. And with 25 charter bus companies having expressed interest in putting the town on their tours and television crews from as far away as Germany and Japan coming to film the prison, Moundsville (population 10,000 and falling) is tying its economic future to the abandoned penitentiary.

Plans are afoot to rebuild the train depot as a welcome center and to carry visitors the half-mile to the prison in horse-drawn buggies or paddy wagons. The riverfront along the Ohio is to be restored, and trees and old-fashioned lights and sidewalks are to line Jefferson Avenue. The empty warden’s house, Remke believes, could become a bed and breakfast.

“My 12-year-old son, Christopher, is severely handicapped, and a lot of people in Moundsville have prayed for him and offered support,” Remke said. “This is my way of repaying the town.”

The other day, former corrections officer Josh White walked through the snow-covered exercise yard and into the dark, cold cellblock known as the Alamo. His footsteps echoed down the corridor that he had patrolled, unarmed, for 21 years. In all that time, he had never seen a man rehabilitated at the Moundsville penitentiary, he said: The attitude they came in with was the attitude they went out with.

“You learned quickly you couldn’t trust any inmate and you couldn’t be polite, or they’d take it as a sign of weakness,” White, 43, said. “We didn’t do them any favors. Basically my job was to make sure they didn’t kill anyone or escape. That was it. But somehow it was a job you took pride in, though that’s hard to explain to outsiders.”

The cells, with their metal double bunks and single light bulb, reached four tiers high. Even in the silence, White can hear the cacophony in the Alamo when inmates started yelling and banging on the bars all at once. And he can remember the first day he reported for work, with no training, and was sent to man a watchtower. He asked what he was supposed to do up there and was told simply: “If you see an inmate on the wall, shoot him.”

In the groups he guides through the prison, White runs into an occasional former inmate he once guarded. They acknowledge each other only with a nod. Of the other visitors, he said: “I think people are fascinated with prisons because everyone who comes through here says: ‘What if it was me behind these walls?’ ”

Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.