A World War I soldier from Wheeling, West Virginia, Lester Scott was drafted in 1917 and trained at Camp Lee, Virginia, where so many Wheeling draftees and volunteers were trained. Scott served as a Wagoner (mule team driver) in the 314th Field Artillery Supply Company, Battery “A,” 80th (Blue Ridge) Division in France. This is his letter home from Camp Lee, September 30, 1917.
Charles “Dutch” Riggle was drafted into the US Army in 1917 and trained at Camp Lee, Virginia, where so many Wheeling draftees and volunteers—including his sister-in-law Minnie Riggle’s brother, Lester Scott—were trained. Dutch Riggle was a Private First Class in the 314th Field Artillery Supply Company, Battery “A,” 80th (Blue Ridge) Division in France.
Riggle was a farm boy with little formal education who grew up in the hills of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He spelled many of his words phonetically. His letters have been transcribed exactly as they were written. Dutch, who arrived in Petersburg, Va. on September 21, 1917, sent the below letter home to his brother James following his first week in Camp Lee. Read More
World War I soldiers from Wheeling, West Virginia, Lester Scott and Charles “Dutch” Riggle were drafted in 1917 and trained at Camp Lee, Virginia, where so many Wheeling draftees and volunteers were trained. Lester Scott served as a Wagoner (mule team driver) in the 314th Field Artillery Supply Company, Battery “A,” 80th (Blue Ridge) Division in France. Dutch Riggle was a PFC with the same unit.
Over the next fourteen months, we will share their letters home, in chronological order, 100 years to the day they were written. To listen to the podcast, visit our SoundCloud page, or subscribe through your favorite podcast app. Read More
Glory, W.Va., 1935.
It wasn’t exactly a parade.
It wasn’t a time for celebration.
It was a time to run for your life.—Movie tagline, The Fools’ Parade
A Premier Premiere CollectionThe night was finally here. After months of anticipation and preparation, the streets of Wheeling were packed with more than 12,000 fans awaiting glimpses of their favorite Hollywood stars. [1] Wheeling’s own Court Theatre was hosting the world premiere of The Fool’s Parade, and an elaborate parade had been staged to lead the stars and other dignitaries through downtown to the corner of 12th and Chapline Streets. Read More
by George S. Jones II and Seán Duffy
“A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.” -Jean Giraudoux
One of the best things about doing local history research and exploring local archival collections is learning about the wonders of old Wheeling that are now lost to time. And some of the most interesting stories about “Lost Wheeling” are often the unlikely ones—the ones that stretch the imagination, like the amusement park on the Lower Sisters Island, the beer garden at Wheeling Park, the town’s old German singing societies, and the Mozart Incline.
Another one of those wonders was a short-lived, championship caliber golf course located “out the crick” on Big Wheeling Creek Road—a place called Cedar Rocks Country Club—where one of the greatest golfers of all time won a tournament 78 years ago today, on September 17, 1938.
And if you’re like me, you’ve probably driven right through this long gone golf course hundreds of times without even realizing it. Read More
-Everett A. Lee, 29 Augusti 2016, Malmö, Sweden
“. . . Local friends of the parents of Everett Lee who have watched the musical progress of young Everett since leaving the city received this bit of news joyfully last week.”
– Wheeling News-Register, 1955
Everett Lee has an impressive resume. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, a student of conducting at Julliard School of Music and Tanglewood, Fulbright Scholar, founder of the Cosmopolitan Symphony, first African American to conduct a major Broadway production, first African American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the south, first African American to conduct a major opera company in the United States, conductor of a traveling Munich Opera House in Germany, the Symphony of the New World in New York, the Bogota Philharmonic and Bogota Symphony in Columbia, the Musical Director of Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, and guest conductor at symphony orchestras such as the St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Cordoba and New York Philharmonics, the Albany, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Hamburg, Bergen, Barcelona Symphonies, and the Boston Pops, to name a few. And it all started here in Wheeling, West Virginia when a young Everett Lee began taking lessons from a violin teacher on Wheeling Island.
Everett Astor Lee was born 100 years ago today, August 31, 1916, right here in Wheeling, WV. The first-born son of Everett Denver Lee and Mamie May Blue Lee, who lived in East Wheeling, young Everett showed an early aptitude for playing violin. Read More
If we’ve learned anything from watching movies, surely we’ve learned that no good can come from unearthing duly interred bodies from sacred ground and moving them (or not) for the sake of development. You don’t build things over an old graveyard. You. Just. Do. Not.
But the fact is, the ground on which the Ohio County Public Library now stands was deeded to the town of Wheeling from Noah and Mary Zane in 1816 for use as “a burying ground.” And, as a burying ground, it was most certainly used.
The Wheeling of one hundred ten years ago was a robust German town, with a German language newspaper, mandatory German language classes in many schools, and German language services in many churches.
It was also home to numerous German choral singing societies, including the Arion, Harmonie, Maennerchor, Beethoven, Germania, Liedertafel, Mozart, Concordia, Liederkranz, and Teutonia. The Turner (or Turnverein) Society emphasized gymnastics and operated Turner’s Hall. The singers were mostly male, accompanied, when needed, by female singers from the women’s auxiliaries. The societies often had their own musicians.
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Nothing says spring quite so clearly as an April day at the old ballpark, with the sun shining warmly on your face and tiny, cool bubbles bursting on the tip of your nose as you raise an ice cold bottle of sweet soda pop to your lips for a refreshing drink. Well, that’s our theory anyway, as we celebrate spring with a new exhibit of baseball artifacts combined with Thad Podratsky’s amazing collection of early Wheeling pop bottles — on display now at the Ohio County Public Library. As a complement to this display, we present a two-part post on the history of baseball and pop bottling in old Wheeling.
▶ Read Part 1: “A Social Game of Ball”
“I do Sierra Mist commercials not because they pay me a lot of money or because it only takes a couple of days. I do it because I have a respect for all sodas and I like to communicate that. Some people say soda, some people say pop. Where I’m from in Indiana they called it breakfast.”
-Comedian Jim Gaffigan
“Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.”
-Lord Byron
Nothing says spring quite so clearly as an April day at the old ballpark, with the sun shining warmly on your face and tiny, cool bubbles bursting on the tip of your nose as you raise an ice cold bottle of sweet soda pop to your lips for a refreshing drink. Well, that’s our theory anyway, as we celebrate spring with a new exhibit of baseball artifacts combined with Thad Podratsky’s amazing collection of early Wheeling pop bottles — on display now at the Ohio County Public Library. As a complement to this display, we present a two-part post on the history of baseball and pop bottling in old Wheeling.
“Ray, people will come Ray … They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past … And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.” -Terence Mann [James Earl Jones] in Field of Dreams
“Wheeling’s a swell town to play [baseball] in. The fans here like a good game an’ don’t care who wins. The kids are bad, though!”
–from The Short Stop (1909) by Zane Grey, writer and baseball player
During the Civil War, Wheeling served as the birthplace of the new state of West Virginia. In the years immediately after the war ended, Wheeling would serve as the birthplace, in the new state, of a new game called “base ball.”
