Today, we're going to introduce you to the city of Wheeling, West Virginia.
Sandwiched between Ohio and Pennsylvania in the narrow 11-mile-wide Northern panhandle of the state, Wheeling is a hard place to categorize.
It sits at a physical transition from the Appalachian mountains to the fields of the Midwest. Its history has been dominated by iron and steel, but also music and culture. It feels part Victorian, part Appalachian, part Rust Belt, part Nashville.
George Fetherling, a Wheeling native, in his book, Wheeling, A Brief History, said the following, describing the city in the early 1800s.
This was the wonder of Wheeling at the time, the fact that it was a mixture of the transient and the stable, the fleeting and the fixed.
We'll use this first episode to give you a bit of Wheeling's story. This will be followed by three more episodes, each featuring a company that has anchored part of Wheeling's past: Wheeling Steel, Bloch Brothers Tobacco, and the radio station WWVA.
I hope you'll find the city and these companies as interesting, surprising, and category-defying as I have.
Resources:
Henry: The life and legacy of Wheeling’s most notorious brewer - Wheeling Heritage Media
How a Wheeling Company Became One of the Country’s Largest Pharmaceutical Giants - Weelunk
Orrick Marks Wheeling Transformation With a Renaming: The Global Operations & Innovation Center
Why Doesn't Every Biglaw Firm Have An Office In Wheeling, West Virginia? - Above the Law
Wheeling, WV