Wheeling (US-WV)
Wheeling is a city in Ohio and Marshall counties in the U.S. state of West Virginia. Located almost entirely in Ohio County, of which it is the county seat, it lies along the Ohio River in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Wheeling was originally a settlement in the British colony of Virginia and later an important city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Wheeling was the first state capital of West Virginia. Due to its location along major transportation routes, including the Ohio River, National Road, and the B&O Railroad, Wheeling became a manufacturing center in the late nineteenth century.Although Wheeling lost its position as state capital in 1865, it continued to grow. In the late nineteenth century, Wheeling was the new state's prime industrial center. One early nickname (until an 1885 strike) was "Nail City", reflecting the iron manufacture in several mills which dated from the 1840s. Mills transformed pig iron into sheets which could be cut, and some mills also produced boiler plates, stoves, barrel rings and/or ornamental ironwork. Noted businesses of the era included the Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company (owned by state Senator Jesse A. Bloch who would in 1913 introduce legislation which became the state's Workmen's Compensation Act), and later steel concerns after development of the Bessemer process. Wheeling Steel Corporation was created in 1920 and grew after a 1927 strike caused J.P. Morgan and other investors to sell National Tube Company, which had been created in 1899, six years after local owners had consolidated five plants in the area as Wheeling Steel & Iron Company.
Postmark Examples
_a.jpg) WHEELING WVa 1907 sent to Hamburg, Germany |
_mc1.jpg)
