Earlier this year, we discovered among our many items stashed away here at the library, a tightly rolled photo labeled “USS Wheeling.” The photograph could be unrolled safely only a few inches, revealing just a few lonely crewmen. Being able to unroll only the first three crewmen left so many questions: Where was this photograph taken? When was it taken? What lie beyond these first crewmen? Can you see the USS Wheeling in the background? Are you curious what else is inside? So were we.
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But first…
Some USS WHEELING BACKGROUND:
Named for our city, the USS Wheeling was a naval gunboat that served in the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, and World War I. Prior to its commissioning, a “committee of representatives” from Wheeling was invited to San Francisco where the ship was built to witness the launching of the gunboat on August 10, 1897. Miss Lucie S. Brown of Wheeling was selected with the honor of officially christening the ship the “Wheeling” before it was sent off to sea. Decommissioned in 1904 and put back into service in 1910, the USS Wheeling was finally put to rest in 1946.
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Now… BACK TO OUR PHOTO:
Last spring, we attended a photo preservation workshop led by a Marshall University Archivist and Manuscripts Librarian. Before heading to the workshop, we were invited to bring items from our collections for consultation. In addition to a stack of photographs stuck together (watch for a future post on that), we brought along the USS Wheeling photograph. Coming out of the workshop, we believed we had the tools to safely unveil the mystery of the USS Wheeling and went about building the proper receptacle to begin unveiling.
The process was a long one, but little by little, the crew members of the USS Wheeling began to appear.
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And finally, after two weeks of careful attending, the entire crew of the USS Wheeling was reunited.
Blessed with captions, we now know this photograph was taken January 24, 1919 in New Orleans, LA. Though the USS Wheeling is not completely visible, in the background, two masts and a chimney matching the above Daily Intelligencer etching peek out from behind the crew.
The crew itself is an interesting study in naval history, as it appears there were at least three African American crew members aboard the USS Wheeling. According to the US Department of Defense, “The Navy’s racial segregation policies limited African Americans’ participation in World War I and, after the war, barred black enlistments altogether from 1919 to 1932. The only black sailors in uniform during that period were the ones aboard in 1919 who were allowed to stay to retire.”
[United States Department of Defense. (2001, February 1). Retrieved December 7, 2014, from http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45742]
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In addition to the African American crew members, several crewmen appear to be of Asian or Pacific Islander decent. As American involvements grew in Asia in the latter part of the 19th century, “the recruitment of Asian aliens for the U.S. military arose from a need for manual labor.” By the beginning of the 20th century, “the increased demands placed on the military to protect U.S. interests in Asia led the military to use local labor (i.e., Asian nationals).”
[Sohoni, D., & Vafa, A. (2010). The Fight to Be American: Military Naturalization and Asian Citizenship. Asian American Law Journal, 17: 131-32. http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1164&context=aalj]
During its commission, USS Wheeling spent time in the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, the coast of China, Japan, Samoa, and Singapore. Of course, we cannot surmise these crew members were recruited from any of these areas, but the photograph itself is an interesting record of our country’s naval history.
The “Great Unrolling” of the USS Wheeling was an exciting moment in our archival work, a step back in history, and a reminder of a proud moment for our City, whose prominent stature by the end of the 19th century was deemed fit by the US Navy to grace the hull of one of its gunships.
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