Wheeling, West Virginia

• 1. Introduction

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  Wheeling, West Virginia carries a name whose origins may trace back to a severed head. The Lenni-Lenape phrase wih link or wee lunk, meaning "place of the head" or "place of the skull," reportedly referred to a grim spectacle at the confluence of Wheeling Creek and the Ohio River. Whether the head belonged to a white settler or a Native American prisoner depends on which source you consult. Either way, the name stuck to a city that would go on to host some of the most consequential political meetings in American history, serve as the capital of two states at once, refuse a gift from one of the richest men in the country, and build the second-longest-running country music radio program in the nation.

  Sitting along the Ohio River in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, Wheeling lies about 60 miles west of Pittsburgh. At the 2020 census it had a population of 27,062. That figure does not convey the outsized role this small city played in shaping the republic around it. The questions worth asking are why a place so modest in size accumulated so much significance, and what happened after the factories went quiet.

• 2. Founding and the Zane Legacy

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  Ebenezer Zane reached the Wheeling area in the fall of 1769 and secured his claim to the land through a practice called tomahawk rights, which involved girdling trees and carving his name into the bark. He returned the following spring with his wife Elizabeth and his brothers Jonathan and Silas, and together they planted the first permanent European settlement in the area, calling it Zanesburg. The French had explored the region before them; a lead plate buried by the explorer Celoron de Blainville in 1749 at the mouth of Wheeling Creek survives as a remnant of that earlier claim.

  George Washington surveyed the land in 1770, several years after Christopher Gist had done the same. In 1793 Ebenezer Zane divided the town into lots, and two years later Wheeling was established as a town by legislative enactment. On the 27th of December 1797, an act of the Virginia General Assembly named Wheeling the county seat of Ohio County. The town was formally incorporated on the 16th of January 1805, and on the 11th of March 1836 it was incorporated as a city.

  The Zane family's presence echoes through the city's most dramatic early story. During the siege of 1782, when a native and British force attacked Fort Henry and exhausted its ammunition, a woman named Betty Zane volunteered to run to the Zane homestead to retrieve gunpowder. She gathered a tablecloth, filled it with gunpowder, and ran back under fire from both native and British soldiers. She was uninjured, and Fort Henry held.

• 3. The Crossroads That Built a City

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  The National Road arrived in Wheeling in 1818, connecting the Ohio River to the Potomac River and turning the city into the gateway to westward expansion. Goods from the Ohio Valley could now flow east, and settlers moving west passed through in large numbers. In 1849 the Wheeling Suspension Bridge spanned the Ohio River, linking the city to Wheeling Island, and the lessons learned in its construction were later applied to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Rail reached the city in 1853 when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad connected Wheeling to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the northeastern markets. The combination of river, road, and rail gave Wheeling an economic reach few cities of its size could match. That tripartite legacy is now embedded in the city's flag, adopted on the 4th of September 2018: two horizontal blue bars represent Wheeling Creek and the Ohio River, with a white bar between them, and the three together stand for the three transportation modes that shaped the city's history.

  By the mid-nineteenth century this mercantile and industrial momentum had also shaped the city's politics. Much of the surrounding land had been farmed by yeoman farmers who owned few or no slaves. The railroad brought a larger industrial middle class that depended on free labor, and the Wheeling Intelligencer newspaper gave voice to the region's strong anti-secession sentiment as the country moved toward civil war.

• 4. Capital of Two States at Once

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  When Virginia voted to secede from the Union in 1861-26 counties in the state's north and west refused to follow. They gathered in Wheeling for what became known as the Wheeling Conventions, two meetings held in that year at the building now called West Virginia Independence Hall. Those conventions reversed Virginia's Ordinance of Secession for the dissenting counties and set in motion the legal and political machinery that would create a new state.

  Wheeling served as the provisional capital of the Restored Government of Virginia from 1861 to 1863, and then became the first capital of West Virginia when that state was admitted to the Union in 1863. For a brief and remarkable period after West Virginia's admission, Wheeling was simultaneously the capital of West Virginia and the capital of Virginia, because the Restored Government of Virginia did not move to Alexandria until August of that same year.

  The Germans of Wheeling played a measurable role in that separation. Many had arrived after the revolutions of 1848 and were firmly opposed to slavery. They organized a unit called the First West Virginia Artillery to oppose the Confederacy, and their cultural institutions, including German Singing Societies whose first chapter began in 1855, had already woven into the city's fabric. Wheeling served as West Virginia's capital from 1861 to 1870, and then again from 1875 to 1885.

• 5. Nail City and Its Labor Wars

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  After losing its status as state capital in 1865, Wheeling pivoted to manufacturing and became the new state's prime industrial center. Its nickname was "Nail City," reflecting the iron mills that had operated since the 1840s. Those mills converted pig iron into sheets that were cut into nails, and some also produced boiler plates, stoves, barrel rings, and ornamental ironwork. The nickname held until an 1885 strike ended that era.

  Labor organization ran deep in Wheeling. The city's earliest union, the United Nailers, formed in 1860 and later merged into the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Cigar makers organized in 1862. The 1877 railroad strike that began in Martinsburg reached Wheeling and spread nationwide. In 1897, Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, and Samuel Gompers all traveled to Wheeling to speak at a national labor convention called to address a nationwide coal strike.

  The politics of labor shaped Wheeling's civic decisions in unusual ways. In 1904, the city became the first in the country to refuse a proposed gift of a free library from Andrew Carnegie, citing his record on labor and specifically the Homestead Strike of 1892. By contrast, cigar tycoon Augustus Pollack, despite an earlier controversy over a plan to use convict labor, left significant bequests to the labor movement, which commemorated him with a memorial statue. Wheeling Steel Corporation was created in 1920, and grew further after a 1927 strike prompted J. P. Morgan and other investors to sell National Tube Company.

• 6. Radio, Music, and the Capitol Stage

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  The Capitol Theatre opened in 1928 with more than 2,500 seats, making it the largest theatre in West Virginia. In the early 1940s it was home to "It's Wheeling Steel," a popular radio program featuring musical performances by workers at a local steel plant. Over the decades the Capitol's stage welcomed Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, B.B. King, and Black Sabbath, as well as comedians and performers including Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin, and David Copperfield.

  The Victoria Theater has an older pedigree. The 700-seat Victorian-style venue is the oldest theater in West Virginia, and it was home to the WWVA Jamboree program from 1933 to 1936. That program ran in various forms until 2007, a span that made it the second-longest-running country radio program and variety show in the country, behind only the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. In 2009 a local initiative called the Wheeling Jamboree revived the spirit of the original broadcast.

  WWVA 1170 AM remains a point of civic pride: it is the state's only 50,000-watt AM station, strong enough to be heard along the East Coast after dark. Wheeling Park High School students operate WPHP 91.9, a student-run station that covers the school's football and basketball games alongside its regular programming.

• 7. After the Factories

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  Wheeling reached its peak population of 61,659 at the 1930 census. The Great Depression cut into that number, and the restructuring of heavy industry after World War II accelerated the decline. Jobs in manufacturing disappeared, and residents followed. By 2020 the census counted 27,062 people, less than half the peak. The median household income in 2020 was $43,483, and the poverty rate stood at 16.5%.

  The city has worked on several fronts to rebuild. The Downtown Wheeling Streetscape project has drawn on the city's architectural heritage to revive its Main Street. The historic building at 1400 Market Street, one block east of Main, has been under redevelopment. Healthcare, education, legal services, entertainment, tourism, and energy now anchor the local economy where steel and nails once did.

  Oglebay Park, one of the city's most visible assets, incorporates five golf courses, a public swimming pool, and the Good Zoo, the only Association of Zoos and Aquariums accredited zoo in West Virginia. Ohio County's six golf courses include designs by Arnold Palmer and by architect Robert Trent Jones. The Wheeling Heritage Port amphitheatre holds more than 8,000 spectators and runs live music several nights per week from mid-spring through late fall, drawing visits from the Delta, Mississippi, and American Queen riverboats along the Ohio River waterfront.