Knowing that this trip would be 600 miles with a lot of up and down driving and a lot of tight curves, I rented a car for this trip.
Our first stop was at the Cumberland, Maryland Historic Railroad Station. This is also a point where the C&O historic canal went. The station has the old railroad terminal and passenger area and lots of artifacts from the period of its great days.
The railroad basically made the canal obsolete even before it was finished. Now the neither the canal nor the railroad is used for commerce but both are used for recreation.
We've been to this site before but not since they added the statue of the mule and attendant.
About five years ago, Irwin and Cheryl bought a place on Deep Creek Lake. It is at the Southern part of the lake and their post office is Oakland, Maryland.
The lake is at about 2500' in elevation and typically it is about 10 degrees cooler than DC. or Baltimore which is very nice in the summer.
Deep Creek Lake was created in 1925 by an electric company which built a dam on the northern side of the valley. It has been a refuge from the tropical summers of DC since at least the 1930s but in the early years, travel to the lake was a problem. Since I-68 was completed in 1991, travel is much easier and recreation activities and summer homes have increased in the area.
We visited them early in the afternoon on Sept 4.
Cooper's Rock is at the edge of the Cheat River Gorge in eastern West Virginia, a few miles from Morgantown.
It bears some resemblance with the Grand Canyon except the valley is only about 1000' below the rim of the overlooking hills. Also, the Grand Canyon is less than 50 million years old, the Cheat River Gorge is several hundred million years old.
The Cheat River flows into the Monongahela River which flows into the Ohio River so its part of the Mississippi River watershed.
The top picture shows the platform is slanted - that's because it is natural rock that really is slanted.
The second image shows part of the Cheat River was taken by a stranger with my camara.
It was very crowded at the end of the park where this overlook was. Lots of people were having picnics and similar events.
After the Park we drove to Morgantown using I-68 which terminates near there. The Local brewery had just finished brewing its Oktoberfest beer and was serving it (fresh draft Oktoberfest beer is a real treat for me).
We drove through much of the campus of the University of West Virginia on the way back to the Interstate 79 and then went into Pennsylvania.
On the way back from the Palace of Gold we drove thru Grand View Park in Moundsville.
This park is on a hill within the city.
In the first image is a tower at the top of the hill.
There is a zip line from the tower which goes to the base of the park. I didn't go on the zip line having been on one in Las Vegas which was nice but not as great as I thought it would be (because you go too fast to really enjoy the scenery).
The second image shows some people just having taken off from the tower (both images from the intenet).
Anyway, the views from the top of the hill were pretty nice but somewhat duplicated by the views from the top of the grave creek mound which are in the next post.
The first image is inside the archeological park museum. The museum is free. Ann is shown with a likeness of an Adena woman. The Adena culture inhabited this area for at least a thousand years and built the mound over a hundred years about 200 BCE.
The second image shows me as I am about to walk up to the top of the mound. The mound is currently about 62' but when it was first completed it was probably about 70' high. The mound was completed in stages. There is a burial site at about 10' above plateau level and another at about 40' above plateau level. Estimated completion of the mound took about 100 years with several million baskets of dirt being carried up to the top.
The 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th images were taken from the top of the mound.
The 3rd image shows the Moundsville Penitentiary which we saw after visiting the mound.
The fourth image shows the Ohio River valley with Moundsville in the foreground and hills on the Ohio side of the river.
The blue structure is the super structure of a bridge that connects Ohio Route 7 with West Virginia Route 2 and was completed in 1986.
The fifth image shows Ann (in orange) at the base of the hill.
The camara image makes the hill seem 200 feet high but it was really about 62' although still a pretty good climb up for me. The mound is the tallest conical Indian mound in the world. There are mounds in Illinois (the Cahokia Mounds) that are higher but they are linear and multilayer. The Moundsville people seem to have had a diet of fish, game, cultivated vegetables (about 50' to the right of Ann in that image is what the archeologists think the Adena people grew in this area) and edible wild plants. The Cahokia people, whose mound building was about 1000 years after the Moundsville people, was based mostly on cultivation of maize.
The sixth image looks out over the roof of the museum and toward the hilly part of Moundsville where Grand Vue Park is located
The seventh image shows a copy of a tablet that was discovered in the lower burial mound in 1838 by several people who excavated the lower part of the mound. This tablet, whose location is currently unknown (copies of the tablet were made soon after it was discovered), is the most controversial archeological find in West Virginia. One theory is that the markings on the tablet are letters and are a semitic right to left Iberian script used about a hundred years before the time of Hannibal (i.e. about 300 BCE). Another tablet from another mound in the vicinity has similar markings.
Other theories are that they are glyphs made by the Adena people. Another theory is that the tablets are a fraud placed by the 1838 team or someone they knew.
When Europeans first came to settle this area, there were Indians in the area but they didn't know anything about the mounds.
After the Grave Creek Mound we took a tour of the Moundsville Penitentiary. It was completed in 1876 and operated until 1995.
The first image is the front of the structure. The building seems to have been designed to be similar to the Penitentiary at Joliet, Illinois, which was completed in 1858 (and closed in 2002). Although the Moundsville Penitentiary is huge, the one at Joliet was almost twice as large in covered ground level. Counting the exercise yard, work yard and other uncovered spaces, the Moundsville facility covers about 19 acres.
It is is also called the West Virginia State Penitentiary (because it was, for many years, the only Penitentiary in West Virginia) or the Marshall County Penitentiary (because it is in Marshall County).
The second image shows one of the cell blocks. It is just one of many and each of the blocks is several stories tall.
At one time the facility held 2000 prisoners. In comparison, the population of Moundsville is about 8000 and Marshall county has about 32,000.
The third image shows a typical cell. They measured 7' by 5' and sometimes during the 2000 prisoner period, there were three people in a cell.
One of the famous people who were held at this penitentiary was Eugene Debs. Debs got about 6% of the vote for President in 1912 and ran for the Senate in Indiana in 1916. He was incarcerated for a few months in 1919 (he got about 3.5% of the Presidential vote in 1920).
In 1983, Charles Manson wrote a letter to the Warden of the Moundsville Penitentiary asking to be transferred there. The request was denied (the letter is displayed in the lobby near the gift shop). Also it's the fourth image.
The fifth image shows some prisoner cell art.
Many of the cells have gruesome and/or frightening art.
Many others have various narratives or poetry or other writing. These are also sometimes gruesome and/or frightening. Other inmate art (and some other images) are at this site.
The sixth image also shows some prisoner art but in this case the prisoner was commissioned by the prison to do the art. In this picture, there are some scenes from the Teenage Mutant Turtle. The figures in the scenes are off color because the artist was colorblind (as you can see, Ann wore orange for the occasion). However, he wanted to make something cheerful because there would sometimes be kids in the contact room (where well behaved inmates could meet people without thick glass between them).
I've been behind bars in Venice (at the Doge's prison) and Alcatraz (I can't remember where I put the electronic images), so I took the tour guide's offer to spend a few moments in a cell there in Moundsville Penitentiary (seventh image). Of course the tour guide pretended that the cell opening device had failed a few minutes after I was in - I think they do this every time. The other people in the group took pictures of me in the cell so, who knows, there may be other blogs with this image floating around in cyber space.
The Moundsville Penitentiary used hanging as capital punishment from 1899 to 1949. In 1931 the public witnessed someone decapitated from hanging and subsequently, the hangings were not open to the public.
West Virginia began using the electric chair in 1951 and continued to do so until 1959. It was called "Old Sparky" (the same name was given to electric chairs in other States) and was built by an inmate at Moundsville (named Paul Glenn). It's the eighth image.
There was a telephone next to the chair (just below the Y in 'SPARKY'). The phone was connected to the Governor's office. It only rang once in the years of electric chair use.
A Youtube tour of the Penitentiary by someone named Greg Cox is here.
West Virginia abolished the death penalty in 1965.
More than 80 executions were carried out. However, the number of people murdered (mostly inmates but some guards and civilians) or who died of disease in the penitentiary was over 800.
The ninth and tenth image are mug shots of myself and Ann. I'm appropriately wearing stripes, Ann is in prison orange.
There are some other interesting things about this penitentiary. There were several riots and quite a few escapes and escape attempts.
One of the most interesting of the escapes is similar to the plot of "The Great Escape". The prisoners, who were working at a green house. The green house was constructed by prisoners and run by prisoners. The prisoners in the green house, dug a tunnel down 8 feet and under the outside wall (which only went down 6 feet).
As in "The Great Escape", a big problem was where to hide the excavated dirt.
In the movie, the prisoners surreptitiously mix excavated dirt with dirt from the compound. In the Moundsville Penitentiary escape, the inmates placed excavated dirt in bags and gave it away to people buying plants as free potting soil.
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