The Inter-Mountain photo by Taylor McKinnie Greg Morgan, a 55-year employee of Davis Trust Company in Elkins, now works alongside his great-niece, Lacie.

ELKINS — As Davis Trust Company celebrates 125 years of business this year, one of its employees is celebrating a milestone of his own. Greg Morgan, who is 75 years old, has worked at the bank for the last 55 years.

While his employment began 55 years ago, Morgan said that he’s been associated with the bank since the minute he was born. As he explained to The Inter-Mountain, Neale’s Drug Store was located across the street from the bank at that time, and he was born in the clinic just above the store.

After graduating high school in 1969, Morgan worked at the Key Market Grocery Store in Crystal Springs before taking an 18-month course at West Virginia Business College in Clarksburg.

“I graduated in March of ’71… I called Mr. (Ralph) Wilmoth here at the bank and asked if he had any jobs opening I could apply for,” Morgan told The Inter-Mountain. “I told him I had just graduated and was looking for a job, and he said, ‘No, but if you would like an interview for practice, I’d be glad to give you one,’ and I thought that was kind of neat.”

The next day, Morgan was interviewed by then-bank president Ralph Wilmoth. The day after that, when Morgan returned home from taking his mother to Buckhannon, his father told him that Wilmoth had called for him, and upon calling Wilmoth back, Morgan was offered a job. As Morgan explained, the job was created due to a previous rule of thumb that “for every million dollars a bank was, you needed one employee.” At the time, Davis Trust Company had grown to $16 million and Morgan would be it’s sixteenth employee.

Morgan’s employment with the bank began on March 15, 1971.

“Whenever I came in, they introduced me to all the other employees, which Donna Thompson, who I graduated with, was working there, and Janice Bodkins, who I had graduated with, she was working here too,” Morgan said. “So that was nice to see people I had been all through school with.”

On his first day, Morgan was shown how to file checks. As Morgan explained, back then they would have to put posted checks into “these big drawers” in the vault, which contained all records of customer accounts.

Morgan said that, while he at first believed it would be tedious work, after filing checks for two or three months, he thought, “I could do this for the rest of my life. This is just the best job in the world.” Despite there being thousands of accounts, customers’ signatures would eventually “burn into your memory,” making it easier and faster to file as time went on.

After two to three months working in the vault, Morgan said he was trained on how to post checks, which including sorting the checks in alphabetical order. He was also trained at the proof machine, where all the checks in the bank were routed, including checks to other banks, and on the teller line.

“Everything was so manual back then,” Morgan said. “We had full keyboard adding machines. It wasn’t the nine keyboard adding machine or anything, it was full keyboard, but luckily you didn’t have to still crank them. You just had to push a button.”

When asked what technological changes have stuck out to him over the years, Morgan said he will never forget when Wilmoth came back from a banking conference, went to the tellers and said, “Boys, you won’t believe what we saw at the conference. Someday there’s going to be a monitor back here on the counter. You’ll be able to come back here to this monitor and you’ll be able to put somebody’s account number in and you’ll be able to see their statement right there, and if they want that statement, you’ll be able to print it out for them.”

“I can remember us just thinking, ‘Wow, that’s just unbelievable,'” Morgan said.

Morgan said that, during his time at Davis Trust Company, he has had a lot of great memories, but the greatest of all was meeting his wife, Pamela, in 1973, who worked as a bookkeeper at the bank. They were married in 1974 and had two children, one in 1976 and the other in 1979.

Working at Davis Trust Company has come to run in Morgan’s family, as his sister-in-law Paula Morgan has also worked at the bank as the trust officer, and now his great-niece, Lacie, who is Paula Morgan’s granddaughter, works alongside him.

When asked what his future holds, Morgan explained that he had originally planned to completely retire in January of 2022; however, that same month, his wife Pamela passed away due to COVID-19.

“After that, (Davis Trust Company) said if I wanted to stay on, I could,” Morgan said. “I hadn’t told them my plans that I was going to quit completely, but, you know, I didn’t have anything else to do, and I thought as long as they like me coming in, I still enjoy coming in.”