Wheeling, West Virginia

I’ve photographed Wheeling, West Virginia, since the mid 1980s, when I first explored the Ohio River Valley. At the time Wheeling was a prosperous place that seemed stuck in a mid-Twentieth Century time warp, inhabited by legions of steelworkers who toiled in the giant mills that hugged the river banks and lit up the sky at night. Now, most of those plants have been shuttered and the jobs have disappeared. Beginning with the opening of the National Road in 1818, Wheeling served as an important conduit for trade and migration between the eastern United States and territories further west. Abundant timber, coal, and iron ore in the surrounding hills gave rise to widespread manufacturing including iron works, boatyards, glass factories, and tobacco plants. By1930 the town had become West Virginia’s commercial and industrial capital, with waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe swelling its population to over 61,000 inhabitants. Today fewer than half that number live in Wheeling. Its landscape of boarded-up stores, abandoned factories, and empty lots where buildings once stood is emblematic of the devastation that has swept through America’s manufacturing regions over the past twenty-five years. People who expected that a lifetime of hard work would earn them some semblance of the American Dream are instead losing their jobs, their homes, and their place in the world.