During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a wave of workers and their families migrated to the banks of the Ohio River in the Appalachian foothills in search of opportunities to forge better lives for themselves. Many of them settled in or near the city of Wheeling, West Virginia, where they labored in the area’s bustling coal mines, iron works, steel mills, tool shops, glass companies, breweries, and cigar factories. Although the conditions were often challenging, they managed over time to carve out an existence here. The city hummed then with the sounds of industrial creation.
This is the Wheeling that frequently occupies the thoughts of 78-year-old Ed Gorczyca and his contemporaries—the Wheeling they say their forbears had doggedly built into a thriving city before the decline took hold of it. Over the course of Gorczyca’s life, the surrounding Upper Ohio Valley's manufacturing industry collapsed, fueling a steady exodus of working-age people and the city’s deterioration. Wheeling's population fell from its peak of 61,659 residents in 1930 to fewer than 28,000 in 2015. Given that viable full-time job opportunities currently remain in relatively short supply, demographers predict that it will be difficult to stop the slide.
However, small signs of renewal are perhaps more visible in Wheeling today than they have been in years. Long-time residents and newcomers have founded city partnerships and grassroots organizations to strengthen the city physically, economically, and spiritually. They’re striving to preserve and promote its history, grow healthy food in what has long been considered a food desert, and create community for those people who have been neglected and marginalized. A collective reassessment of the city's identity is taking place, yielding both eulogies for what is missing and hope for what might be restored or invented.
What calls to people in Wheeling today? Is it the song of dusk enveloping the grand old bridge? Is it the warm theater where Frankenstein used to appear glowing on celluloid at the midnight show? It could indeed be something already lost to time, that elusive specter of the now vacant department store's holiday model trains making their rounds or some other loved thing that may somehow return to town. Or it could be the stubborn sense of promise that was held between these hills for someone's parents, the promise that built this city and survived a precipitous fall, a promise that says you could write the next chapter of Wheeling's story.
