(Managing Editor’s Note: This is the third story to appear on LEDE News thanks to a partnership procured with West Virginia Explorer and David Sibray. David is lucky enough to have a job that involves constant travel through the state of West Virginia, and he recently celebrated his 20th anniversary.)
If you were a young boy growing up in West Virginia prior to the 1980s, there’s a chance your misbehaviors were met with the parental threat of banishment to Pruntytown.
Pruntytown! For many boys, it was as effective as any bogeyman. Almost any infraction that could not otherwise be dealt with might lead to the threat, which for many children was effective because it was practically incomprehensible.
“I remember not understanding exactly what Pruntytown was, which perhaps made it all the more threatening,” recalls Carlos Escobar, who grew up in Charleston.
“I didn’t really believe in the place or that I’d be sent there, but I suppose because it was called a ‘town’ and because it might have been associated with prunes. How were prunes involved?
“It was bizarrely effective—on the same level as being given lumps of coal rather than toys for Christmas.”
However, as adults who lived anywhere near the town knew, it was a very real place. Photographer Brian Peterman, who grew up not far from Pruntytown, says knowing it was real might have made the threat worse.
“We were actually told that there were people who drove around in vans like dog catchers ready to capture children who stayed out too late,” Peterman laughed. “And whereas boys were threatened with Pruntytown, girls were threatened with being sent to Salem.”
From 1891 to 1983, it was the site of the West Virginia Industrial Home for Boys, the chief state detention center for juvenile male offenders. In 1899, the West Virginia Industrial Home for Girls was opened at Salem, West Virginia.
As part of their reformational experience, boys were made to work on a nearby state-managed farm, which later became a state game farm and is now the Pruntytown State Farm Wildlife Management Area.
Both the facilities at Salem and Pruntytown closed in 1983, after which the girls’ facility was redesignated as the West Virginia Industrial Home for Youth, and in 1985 the facility at Pruntytown became a state prison for adult offenders of both genders, renamed the Pruntytown Correctional Center.
Thirty-two female prisoners were moved to Pruntytown from the Alderson Federal Prison Camp at Alderson, West Virginia, in 1988, though in 2007 the females were transferred to Lakin Correctional Center near Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Pruntytown no longer houses female prisoners.
The facility now has a capacity of 369 inmates with a 24-bed substance-abuse treatment unit and an additional 24 beds designated as pre-treatment. Its residents are now classified as low-public-risk inmates.
Long before Pruntytown had become infamous as a reformatory, it enjoyed fame principally because of the character of its founder, the “tempestuous, profane” John Prunty.
Why? Follow this link to find out … https://wvexplorer.com/2019/12/31/pruntytown-wv-bogeyman-west-virginia/.
