How did so many Irish immigrants end up in the United States and in Wheeling?
There were many waves of immigration. But the biggest one related to the Gaelic -mostly Catholic- Irish, was caused by starvation.
In oversimplified terms: by the mid-19th century, the tenant farmers and working poor of Ireland had become dependent on the potato crop for survival. Starting in 1845, an insidious potato blight resulted in crop failure after crop failure. People starved. Read More
In recent years, Wheeling has joined the national celebration of Juneteenth, with the 2022 version featuring events at the Ohio County Public Library, YWCA, Market Plaza, and Heritage Port. See details.
Juneteenth is a celebration of the liberation of Texas slaves in execution of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which applied only to slaves held in states in rebellion—that is, Confederate states. On June 19, 1865, roughly 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas and announced that “the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as ‘Juneteenth,’ by the newly freed people in Texas.” Source.
Juneteenth was made a federal holiday on June 19, 2021. Wheeling had already begun marking the day a few years prior.
But historically, the African American population in the Wheeling area had celebrated “Emancipation Day,” despite the fact that no slaves were freed in West Virginia (which had joined the Union in 1863), by Lincoln’s executive order. The date chosen (probably in hopes of fairer weather) was actually that of the so-called preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, announced on September 22, 1862. The official order would come on January 1, 1863. Read More
By Linda Comins
Wheeling’s prominent gifts to the world include Dr. Marion Theresa Moses, who was born in the city in the early 20th century and became a national authority on pesticides. She was also the trusted colleague and physician to labor leader Cesar Chavez and the beloved friend and personal physician to social activist Dorothy Day.
Dr. Marion Theresa Moses was born in Wheeling on January 24, 1936. She was the second of eight children born to Maron Moses and Mary Wakim Moses.
Before his untimely death, Wheeling Hall of Fame member Chu Berry famously played tenor sax in Cab Calloway‘s Orchestra from 1937-1941. [1] By the time Berry joined the orchestra, Calloway had already developed his legendary style made famous by appearances in films such as the Betty Boop: Minnie the Moocher short (Paramount Pictures, 1932), Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho (1934), and Stormy Weather (20th Century Fox, 1943), all long before his cameo in the 1980 Universal Studios cult classic, The Blue Brothers. “Clad in white tie and tails, dancing energetically, waving an oversized baton, and singing,” writes Alyn Shipton in his Calloway biography, Hi-De-Ho, “Cab Calloway is one of the most iconic figures in popular music.” [2]
But prior even to Calloway’s birth, Will H. Dixon initiated the style that would lead him to be dubbed the original dancing conductor. [3] James Weldon Johnson – American writer, civil rights activist, and early leader of the NAACP — wrote of Dixon: “All through a number he would keep his men together by dancing out the rhythm, generally in graceful, sometimes in grotesque, steps. Often an easy shuffle would take him across the whole front of the band. This style of directing not only got the fullest possible response from the men but kept them in just the right humour for the sort of music they were playing.” [4] By the time Calloway was born in 1907, Dixon was not only a famed stage conductor, but an accomplished singer, pianist, actor, comedian, playwright, and composer of both popular and classical music.
And he was a Wheeling native. Read More
by Seán Duffy and Erin Rothenbuehler
On February 2, 2021, we presented a Lunch With Books Livestream program exploring the lives, times, and achievements of nine leaders of Wheeling’s African American community during the era of “Jim Crow” segregation, including: barber Henry Boose Clemens; police officer William Alexander Turner; firefighter Ashby Jackson; attorney Harry H. Jones; medical doctors Boswell Henson Stillyard, Julia Katherine Pronty Davis; Robert Maceo Hamlin; and Alga Wade Hamlin; and musician Will H. Dixon.
This post will serve as the penultimate supplement to our livestream video. A profile of Will H. Dixon will follow. Read More
On February 2, 2021, we presented a Lunch With Books Livestream program for the Ohio County Public Library, exploring the lives, times, and achievements of nine leaders of Wheeling’s African American community during the era of “Jim Crow” segregation, including: barber Henry Boose Clemens; police officer William Alexander Turner; firefighter Ashby Jackson; attorney Harry H. Jones; medical doctors Boswell Henson Stillyard, Julia Katherine Pronty Davis; Robert Maceo Hamlin; and Alga Wade Hamlin; and musician Will H. Dixon.
This post, about Henry Boose Clemens (1843-1923), will serve as the second supplement (after Dr. B.H. Stillyard) to our livestream video. Additional supplements will be posted soon. Read More
In 1918, American soldiers – “Doughboys,” as they were known, probably because of their dusty uniforms during the war with Mexico 70 years prior – filled training facilities like Virginia’s Camp Lee in preparation for entering the European conflict that would one day be termed “World War I.”
But our Doughboys were already at war with a microscopic enemy – a deadly H1N1 virus misnamed “Spanish Flu.” These soldiers faced the prospect of war during a worldwide pandemic thought to have originated, not in Spain, but in an American military training camp. By the end of that fateful year, influenza would claim some 45,000 American soldiers (many before they completed basic training), nearly as many as the 53,000 killed in the trenches of France. Read More
by Laura Jackson Roberts, Christina Fisanick, and Seán Duffy with research by Erin Rothenbuehler
The Ohio Valley is haunted. That’s an undeniable fact.
Like any place on the planet with a past chock full of human triumph and folly, greed and generosity, good and evil – the Ohio Valley is haunted by the ghosts of its own, by turns, bloody, joyful, corrupt, tragic, and hilarious lived human experience – its rich, much celebrated, sometimes regretted, and often downright scary, history.
“Real” ghosts? Ghouls? Spirits? Specters? Poltergeists? Phantoms? Yeah, those too…
Maybe. Perhaps. Kind of…
So, how about a trilogy of the latter for Halloween fun? Fact or fiction? History or lore? You be the judges. But be warned: these reasonably true tales of terror are not for the faint of heart.
Turn on some lights, and read on…
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As the Industrial Revolution roared across the United States, entire towns were built for the sole purpose of housing mill workers and their families. Like rural coal patch towns, mill towns were company towns, that is, owned lock, stock, and barrel by the mill. Workers lived, labored, played, and prayed in company-owned buildings on company-owned land. And when the mills closed, the buildings were often razed and the land was left fallow or sold to the highest bidder.
The village of Power was a mill town that sat along the Ohio River in Brooke County, West Virginia. It was formed in 1917 to house workers of the Windsor Power Plant, which would eventually provide electricity for the northern panhandle, western Pennsylvania, and as far west as Canton, Ohio. Read More
October 24, 1944. 5 o’clock p.m. South China Sea.
The nearly 7,000-ton Japanese freighter, Arisan Maru, is churning toward Formosa. Packed in the stifling heat of the ship’s holds are 1,782 mostly American and some Allied war prisoners of the Empire of Japan. The men are destined for forced labor camps.
Seeing only an unmarked enemy vessel, a U.S. Navy submarine, the USS Shark, fires three torpedoes. Direct hit. Split in two, the Arisan Maru slips beneath the waves in less than two hours. While most of the POWs escape the sinking ship, they are left to die on the open sea. The Japanese navy attempts no rescue. Only nine men survive. It is the largest loss of life at sea in American history.
Among the dead is 42 year-old Private First Class Frederick William Elkes, a 17-year veteran of the U.S. Army Air Force, 17th Pursuit Squadron, 24th Pursuit Group. Stationed in the Philippines, the South Wheeling boy who grew up on McColloch Street, was captured during the fall of Bataan. Read More
