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PENCE SPRINGS--Inhabitants of the now-luxurious Pence Springs Resort Hotel didn't used to come for the beautiful surroundings and historic ambiance and they couldn't check out the next morning.
Guests of the hotel were called inmates for more than 40 years when the hotel served as the West Virginia State Women's Penitentiary.
It was a maximum security facility, which looked more like a dormitory, except for the 12-foot-high security fence around the property, solitary confinement cells on the third floor and iron bars on the windows and doors.
The prison housed an average of 44 inmates from 1947 until it was closed in 1983.
The hotel was first built in 1912, but it burned down and construction began on the new building in 1913.
By 1918, the hotel was accommodating 125 guests daily in the 60-room resort complex, which lured people from around the United States to the area for its natural mineral springs.
During Prohibition, the hotel was a popular site for bootleggers and people who didn't abide by the "dry state" law in effect in West Virginia from 1914 through 1920.
Two secret whiskey cellars were hidden under the front porch, with a tunnel from the outside where guests at the casino in the hotel complex could have access to the liquor.
It was also a women's finishing school for a few years--Salem Women's Academy--which as established by...