At precisely 8:30 a.m. yesterday, a galvanized steel door rolled open in the south end of a 40-foot limestone wall near the Ohio River to permit a specially designed coach bus to exit.

On board were the last 21 inmates to leave the 123-year-old state prison in Pittsburgh. After being incarcerated at the state's oldest prison, the prisoners were headed to a brand new prison in Marienville, Forest County.

The bus pulled into the prison parking lot, where about two dozen employees of the State Correctional Institution Pittsburgh were gathered to bid farewell to that prison, long known as Western Pen.

"It's heart-wrenching," said Cliff Grogan Jr., 52, of McCandless, a former prison officer who retired two years ago.

For Grogan and his sister, Diane, who retired after 27 years in the prison's inmate records department, the closing of the Woods Run prison ends an intimate and tragic piece of their lives.

On Nov. 12, 1965, their father, Clifford Grogan Sr., was fatally stabbed seven times by an inmate when he intervened to stop an attack on another officer.

The senior Grogan's picture has been on a plaque in the prison lobby for more than 30 years, alongside plaques for the three other officers who died at the hands of inmates:
Sgt. John T. Coax and Deputy Warden John A. Pieper were shot to death in 1924 during a prison riot. Capt. Walter Lee Peterson was tortured and sliced to death by cop killer Stanley Hoss and two other inmates in 1973.

The Grogans were among a handful of retirees who joined prison employees yesterday for a brief ceremony in the prison lobby about 10 minutes after the inmate bus pulled out. The ceremony ended when Acting Superintendent Paul Stowitzky removed the plaques of Clifford Grogan Sr. and the three other slain officers from the wall.

The plaques, along with photographs, logs, weapons made by inmates and other artifacts, will be placed in storage at the state Department of Correction's training facility in Elizabethtown, Lancaster County, until the department comes up with money for a planned corrections museum.

The state plans to mothball the prison, which opened in 1882, and to maintain a skeleton staff of a few officers and maintenance workers there in the event its 1,100 cells are needed again.

"This facility may close, it may be mothballed, but this is one of the best-operated, best-run institutions in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections," said William Stickman, deputy secretary of the Western Region. He started as an officer at Western Pen 25 years ago.

Before Stickman made his remarks during the ceremony, he read a few paragraphs from a report written in 1910 by the prison's warden who recommended it be closed because of its dilapidated condition and susceptibility to flooding from the Ohio River. It was a battle that went on for nearly a century before state officials finally ordered the prison shuttered two years ago.

Most of the prison's employees, who once numbered nearly 800, are gone now. For the few that remain, today is their last day before they begin new jobs next week at other state prisons, mainly new facilities in Fayette and Forest counties. Some employees chose to retire rather than begin commutes to the new prisons, some as long as two hours each way. Most others found jobs at the new prisons or other institutions in Greensburg and Mercer.