Pa. prison camp once called a ‘country club’ for notable inmates goes on the market (2024)

MONTGOMERY – The Allenwood Federal Prison Camp, once derided as a “country club” for federal inmates, has long been abandoned to nature.

The minimum-security camp 10 miles south of Williamsport housed more than 700 inmates, including Nixon’s Watergate plumbers G. Gordon Liddy and Jeb Stuart Magruder.

But it closed July 18, 2005, and today is no longer listed among U.S. Bureau of Prisons facilities. The grounds and roads have not been maintained, says the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and the buildings are empty and unused.

“It is literally nature overtaking the remains of the camp,” said Suzanne Brown, spokesperson at the adjoining Allenwood Correctional Complex.

Now the 1,067-acre property has been deemed surplus, and been made available for sale. Sunday is the deadline for any potential buyers to express interest.

As of Wednesday, the only letter of interest received was from Lycoming County whose landfill occupies nearly half the 1,067 acres under a special use permit, a GSA spokesman said.

The county would like to acquire the site for its Department of Resource Management Services, director of administration Matthew A. McDermott said.

The next step in the process, he said, would be to conduct an appraisal of the property.

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey said he was told by the bureau that the camp, located just to the north of the three-prison federal complex, was deactivated because of cost considerations. U.S. Rep. Fred Keller said he was told it was closed because it was unusable, unsafe and beyond repair.

The county-owned public White Deer Golf Course also adjoins the camp. The entrance road to the camp provides access to the course. Motorists who venture too far beyond the golf course access encounter a locked gate with a metal Allenwood sign above.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the public at times was allowed access to the Stone Church and adjoining cemetery that is on prison land. Access to the cemetery is being evaluated on a case-by-case basis, a prison spokesperson said.

The church was one of three that served the village of Alvira that was bulldozed and burned in 1942 when the War Department, now the Department of Defense, purchased more than 8,000 acres for a massive TNT plant that operated for only a year.

It became the Susquehanna Ordnance Depot to store munitions, historian and retired Williamsport educator Stephen Huddy noted in his book: “The Land: a Biography of 13 square miles of the White Deer Valley.”

Huddy, in his book, described the transition from an ordnance depot to a prison camp.

After many unsuccessful attempts to market the acreage as factory-ready, the Defense Department in 1950 leased 4,300 acres to the Justice Department.

It was to be used in conjunction with a nationwide program to house “internal dissidents and subversives” and other perceived socialist/communist enemies of the people, Huddy wrote.

The Allenwood Federal Subversives Camp opened April 23, 1952, one of six such detention centers nationally and the only one east of the Mississippi. But it was never used for that purpose.

By that time, the North Eastern Penitentiary, which is now the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, was becoming vastly overcrowded with hard-core criminals.

“The Justice Department seized the opportunity to ship some of its non-violent, compliant prisoners to the newly named Allenwood Federal Prison Camp,” Huddy wrote. “Work was done to transform and rebuild some of the remaining prisoner of war administrative structures to meet the needs of the inmates known as ‘trustees.’”

The Allenwood camp opened as a satellite of the Lewisburg federal prison, but became independent in 1976. The inmate population soared through the Vietnam anti-war, Watergate corruption and white collar crime eras.

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But the type of prisoner housed there was becoming increasingly problematic for a prison without armed guards and little fencing, Huddy wrote.

Camp officials acknowledged the fence around the facility was intended more to keep the public out than inmates in.

Deer hunters posed a greater concern to inmates than the prisoners themselves, retired Assistant U.S. Attorney Frederick E. Martin recalls. State Game Lands 252 border the camp because in 1962 the feds transferred 3,018 acres to the commonwealth.

Inmates enjoyed freedom of movement, HBO on television, softball field, tennis and bocce courts and walls for handball. The road around the buildings was popular with joggers.

Walkaways occurred, and on occasion inmates would be caught with women in a motel along nearby Route 15.

Prisoners were subjected to five daily headcounts and had to be in their assigned cubicles for the one at 4 p.m.

If they qualified they could enroll in occupational education courses offered through the Williamsport Area Community College, now the Pennsylvania College of Technology.

A $4.3 million expansion completed in 1987 enlarged two single-story dormitories to hold 375 inmates each. That enabled the Bureau of Prisons to convert another dorm into an administrative building with more extensive office, medical and educational space.

Asbestos was removed from the dorms and the camp was made compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, said Dennis Faulk, a retired public information officer there.

A year later, a $1.3 million product-development center for UNICOR Federal Prison Industries Inc. was established.

It was believed to be the first stand-alone engineering and product-development center in the country to be located at a correctional institution.

Its primary functions were to engineer, produce blueprints, make prototypes and test wooden furniture that would be made in other federal prisons.

Inmates built desks and office furniture in another building that were sold to federal agencies. The $11 million in sales in 1988 generated $3 million in profits, a prison spokesman said then.

Among the other notable inmates that called Allenwood home for part of their lives included Watergate conspirators Egil Kroh, James McCord, Charles E. Colson and E. Howard Hunt.

Former U.S. Sen. Harrison Williams of New Jersey, convicted in the Abscam case, served time there, as did author Ralph Ginzburg and state Sen. Henry F. “Buddy” Cianfrani.

Also Allenwood alums were the late Johnny Sample, who played in the NFL for Baltimore and the New York Jets, and William T. Smith, a former Dauphin County Republican chairman who died recently.