On August 1, 1918, industrialist Ernest Weir renamed his company Weirton Steel. He’d founded the company with J. A. Phillips in Clarksburg in 1905 as Phillips Sheet & Tin Plate. After Phillips’ death, Weir moved his company from Clarksburg to a southern Hancock County farm that would become the city of Weirton.
As part of the massive National Steel conglomeration, Weirton Steel became our state’s largest employer and taxpayer, and the world’s largest tin-plate producer. The city’s population exploded from virtually nothing to 8,000 in 1920 and 18,000 in 1940. During World War II, the company produced howitzer shells and other munitions and contributed to the atom bomb project. The company continued to grow after the war but suffered from foreign competition in the late 20th century.
In 1984, Weirton steelworkers purchased the plant in an innovative employee-ownership plan, or ESOP. The rest of the ‘80s were profitable, but business fell off dramatically in the ‘90s. In 2003, Weirton Steel, entered into bankruptcy. Since that time, the company has been sold twice and is now owned by ArcelorMittal. Employment at ArcelorMittal Weirton continued to decline. By 2010, the company ranked as the 67th largest private employer with about 1,000 workers.
Still, ArcelorMittal Weirton remained the world’s largest tin plate producer, despite having no hot metal operations. The extant parts of the mill receive coils from ArcelorMittal’s other American operation and clean and coat them.
Parts of the former steel giant, including the open hearth, blooming mill, quality control lab, and research and development structures, have been razed. A site on Weirton Heights was cleared to make way for a new Wal-Mart, a company which now holds the distinction of being West Virginia’s largest private employer.
In Appalachia, we know too well the symptoms of industry in decline. However, some aspects are much more visual than others.
On March 9, I stood anxiously with a crowd of Weirton natives and former steelworkers on a hillside in Weirton, West Virginia, overlooking Weirton Steel’s Basic Oxygen Plant, or BOP. Thousands of people contributed to the steelmaking process in the huge structure since its construction in 1967. Now, they were offering their final goodbyes.
An implosion crew far down below sounded the one-minute warning with an airhorn. All the small talk came to a halt, and for a few moments, the gentle birdsong coming from the trees disguised the fact that everyone was bracing for a huge explosion.
Lights flashed across the rusted structure, followed by a blanketing of noise that enveloped the hillside. The BOP fell forward, unleashing a huge cloud of dust that sped towards the neighborhood below. A giant pile of sheet metal and structural beams was all that remained of what was once called ‘the Mill of the Future’.
Credit Ella Jennings
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A view of Weirton Steel’s Basic Oxygen Plant undergoing deconstruction from Route 2 in Weirton.
My dad, Burt Jennings, was there with me. He had worked in the BOP for a year in 1990, and then all over the mill as a firefighter from 1994 to 2004. He was interviewed by a reporter for WTOV9, and his voice cracked as he spoke.
“It’s really — it’s sad. It is sad,” he said. “So many good guys worked down there. So many families grew out of that mill. It’s sad — really good men and women worked in there. It’s sad for me.”
As the crowd slowly walked away, a man asked me what I was recording the implosion for. After I explained, he commented, “you noticed no one was clapping.”
I was somewhat of an emotional wreck the rest of the day. I even cried a few times. But a year ago, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought. It wasn’t until after I started this project that I found myself caring about the town. Growing up, I hated Weirton. It was a place where people always reminisced about the past, because there wasn’t much to look forward to in the present.
Credit Ella Jennings
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A cloud of dust rises from what was once Weirton Steel’s Basic Oxygen Plant.
After my parents divorced, I moved to Weirton with my mom and lived there from 2005 until I graduated from Weir High School in 2014. It wasn’t an exciting place to be a kid. There are a lot of cafes around town, but not the kind for coffee; they’re gambling joints with video lottery machines. The West Virginia Limited Video Lottery Act in 2001 allowed up to 9,000 video lottery retailers in the state, and paired with the decline of the steel industry in Weirton, these cafes provided many businesses with easy revenue. Even the old Dairy Queen was converted into a video lottery hot spot, which spurred two middle school girls to start a petition to bring back places for kids to go in the city. The most popular place for high schoolers to hang out was the Sheetz parking lot.
When the time came to go to college, I couldn’t have been more happy. I arrived at West Virginia University ready to forget everything before my freshman year of college. And for a long time, I did do just that. I enrolled in journalism classes and found myself happily removed from anything to do with the Ohio Valley.
But, as I matured, I realized there was a story behind why my childhood home faces so many struggles. The term “deindustrialization” became an obsession of mine as I studied the structural issues that led to Weirton’s blighted state.
We are not alone in our struggles; hundreds of small towns and cities across the U.S. and the world have faced the consequences that come along with the steady decline of manufacturing employment. Businesses close, populations decline, the middle class shrinks, and people are left wondering what happened to their once prosperous community. How do people cope when the economy advances and they’re left behind in the rubble? I set out to find an answer to that question.
In this five-part, personal narrative podcast, you’ll follow along with me as I discover more about my city’s steeltown past and the social and economic repercussions that played out in the area as the United States’ steel industry fell. This was a journey of self-discovery for me as I made a connection with my hometown that I never thought would be possible, and I hope you will make a connection with Weirton as well.
A subcommittee designed to listen to public concerns and ideas about the Public Employees Insurance Agency will have four more meetings over the next few days, according to Governor Jim Justice.
The public outreach subcommittee for the PEIA Task Force will hold meetings in Wheeling, Weirton, Flatwoods, and Spencer.
Meetings are planned at West Virginia Northern Community College in Wheeling and at the Thomas E. Millsop Community Center in Weirton — both Saturday at 11:00 a.m.
On Tuesday, the task force will stop at both Braxton County High School and Spencer Middle School at 6:30 p.m.
The Task Force was formed by the governor during West Virginia’s teacher walkouts earlier this year to come up with solutions to fix rising costs and premiums in the state’s public health insurance.
These are four of 21 planned public outreach meetings throughout the state. The goal is to allow West Virginians to voice their experiences with PEIA and suggest ways to improve it.
A West Virginia police officer who was fired after he refused to shoot a man who had a gun has settled a lawsuit for $175,000.
The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia announced the settlement with the city of Weirton on Monday.
In the lawsuit, Stephen Mader said he did nothing wrong in May 2016 when he tried to persuade 23-year-old R.J. Williams of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, to put down his weapon. Another officer later saw Williams with his gun raised and fatally shot him. Williams’ gun was unloaded. Mader said he determined Williams wanted to die by “suicide by cop.”
Mader still maintains his firing was unjustified. In the statement, he said he was “happy to put this chapter of my life to bed. My hope is that no other person on either end of a police call has to go through this again.”
Weirton City Manager Travis Blosser said Monday that the city stands by Mader’s firing. Officials in Weirton, an Ohio River community of 19,000 residents 36 miles west of Pittsburgh, had said Mader was fired eight weeks after the shooting for conduct unbecoming of an officer in three separate incidents.
“We still feel we made the correct decision,” Blosser said in a telephone interview. “We don’t regret that decision. We feel we made the correct decision for the community.”
Blosser said the decision to settle the lawsuit was made by the city’s insurance carrier.
Williams was black and Mader is white. The shooting occurred in the midst of a national debate about whether race figures into law enforcement in the black community.
The lawsuit contended Mader was fired specifically for the Williams incident. Mader had said he would have done nothing differently. The lawsuit cited the state constitution, which prohibits a police officer from using deadly force unless the officer has reason to believe the target of such force poses an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to the officer or others.
According to the lawsuit, Mader responded to a call from Williams’ girlfriend that he was threatening to hurt himself with a knife. Mader said his Marine Corps and police officer training taught him to assess a threat level. He said Williams was visibly upset but not aggressive or violent.
Mader believed Williams did not pose a risk of death or serious bodily injury to himself or others. After Mader ordered Williams to drop his unloaded gun, Williams responded, “I can’t do that. Just shoot me,” according to the lawsuit.
Two other officers arrived and when Williams raised his gun, one of the officers fatally shot Williams in the head. Investigations found the officer did nothing wrong.
Mader’s lead attorney, Timothy O’Brien of Pittsburgh, said in the statement that Mader’s attempt to de-escalate the situation “should have been praised, not punished. Simply put, no police officer should ever feel forced to take a life unnecessarily to save his career.”
Mader’s personnel file, previously obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request, included an investigative report by a Weirton police captain who wrote that Williams presented “a clear and present danger” to others and recommended Mader’s firing for several incidents.
In March 2016, Mader was issued a verbal warning for opening a car door to place a parking ticket inside without having a search warrant and cursing at the car owner’s wife. A disorderly conduct charge against the owner was later dropped.
A month later, Mader responded to a call about a cardiac arrest and found a woman dead on a stairway. Mader determined the victim died of natural causes. He didn’t fill out a police report, collected no evidence and the body was sent to a funeral home. Police Chief Rob Alexander called the handling of the suspicious death “unacceptable,” and an autopsy determined the victim sustained blunt force trauma to the neck and upper torso.
87-year-old Jim Shaffer has had his hands busy since 1946. He’s the last commercial broom-maker left in West Virginia. People from all over the country have come to see and take home some of Schaffer’s work. On Saturday September 30th a short film about Jim Shaffer will be screened at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.. The event is free and open to the public.
The state folklorist Emily Hilliard teamed up with Inside Appalachia earlier this year to produce the story about Jim Shaffer, as part of a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting and the West Virginia Folklife Program. Roxy Todd down with Emily Hilliard to talk about her work and a new project she’s starting to try to connect younger folklorist with traditional artisans across West Virginia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3lrgTn2hyM
Roxy Todd: Can you talk about why you think Jim Shaffer’s broom-maker story resonated with people across the country.
Emily Hilliard: Sure. So I think on one hand it resonated with people who are from West Virginia and live in West Virginia because they know Jim and they’ve been buying his brooms for years and years at Pile’s Hardware, or through Lions Clubs, or directly from Jim.
Credit Emily Hilliard/ WV Folklife Program
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James Shaffer first learned to make brooms in 1946
Roxy: Yeah. Do you have any idea how many brooms he’s made over the years?
Emily: I actually calculated this. He said he’s made about 300 brooms a week, now down to 200. But over 70 years that amounts to almost a million brooms. So I was just thinking, that’s a million brooms that have been in a million homes, a million janitor closets, a million witches costume, Harry Potter costumes. And so he’s really touched a lot of lives with this object that such a daily tool.
Roxy: Yeah you don’t think about a broom. But we all use it, for the most part, unless our house is extremely messy! But also it resonated with people outside of West Virginia who had never heard of Jim Shaffer or, you know, the Charleston Broom and Mop Company. I mean when I talked to him he had heard from people from Florida, from New York who came to visit him. And that’s incredible.
Emily: Yeah I think part of that is because Jim is just so compelling of a person. And also his longevity in the trade is a really interesting story. He’s basically been making brooms the same way for 70 years. But the whole infrastructure has changed around him. So I think maybe there’s some nostalgia. His workshop looks a lot like what I remember my grandfather’s garage looking like. So I think it resonated on a few different levels.
Roxy: And Emily you’re the West Virginia State folklorist, and you’re about to complete your second year. Do you know how many interviews you’ve recorded so far across West Virginia.
Emily: I think we have about 50 oral history interviews of at least an hour long, generally, with 65 different consultants because sometimes we do interviews with multiple people at once. And that’s probably from about half the counties in the state.
Roxy: When I think of folklore sometimes they think about banjo players, I think about weavers. Who else is included in this collection of interviews that you’ve done so far?
Emily: Sure. So folklore we think of as the art of everyday life, so it’s pretty expansive. So far we have worked with people from the Serbian community in Weirton.
Credit Emily Hilliard/ WV Folklife Program
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Serbian festival in Weirton
So some of the men who prepare their chicken feasts each week in the summer, and the Reverend at the Serbian church, they’re Greek dancers. I’ve also interviewed labor songwriters like Elaine Purkey, turkey call makers in Jackson County. So it’s really all over the map. And I think we will expand more and more with interviews. And the definition of what folk life is can include newer emergent traditions.
Credit Emily Hilliard/ WV Folklife Program
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Desert at the Serbian festival in Weirton
Roxy: As you’ve been doing this for the past year and a half or two years. Do you see a lot of hope for these things to continue being passed down or do you think that the younger generation is sort of losing touch with a lot of these traditional crafts?
Emily: I definitely see that the younger generation is invested in these traditions, and that has been so exciting. One example is there’s an 18-year-old Morgan Rice in Helvetia, West Virginia.
Credit Andrew Bain
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She was working on the ramp supper, and a few years ago the ramps supper was struggling, because they were competing with other events in the area. And it’s a pretty remote place, so they just couldn’t draw the audience like they used to. And they had it in mind that they were going to cancel the dinner. And so Morgan took it upon herself to create a petition. And she sent it to everyone in Helvetia that said, ‘what am I going to bring my kids back to if this ramps supper goes away? This is really important to the life of Helvetia and to my life personally.’
And so two women in the Farm Women’s Club, that Morgan is a part of, decided to support her. And they all worked together to kind of re-evaluate, and I think they boosted their marketing, and they decided that they would have the ramp supper again. And Morgan says that even though it was a terrible day weather-wise, they had a huge crowd. And so it has continued. They had a big [ramp supper] one this past year. So that’s been really exciting to see that young people have a hand in passing on these traditions and they can make a difference.
Roxy: So what’s next for the West Virginia Folklife program?
Credit Emily Hilliard/ WV Folklife Program
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Handcarved turkey call maker, trapper, and bow-hunter Aaron Parsons, 20, of Ravenswood, W.Va.
Emily: So we are launching an apprenticeship program. Gerry Milnes ran a similar program out of Augusta for many years. It has stipends available for Master traditional artists to work with an apprentice and do a yearlong in-depth apprenticeship, and that will culminate in a final public showcase that we’ll have here in Charleston. Those apprentices and master artists will share their performance, if it’s a performance form, or demonstrate what they do or prepare food if it’s food-ways apprenticeship.
Roxy: Well Emily, good luck in the next year and I’m sure we’ll hear more of your adventures on West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
Emily: Sounds great. Thanks so much.
Emily Hilliard is the West Virginia State folklorist from the West Virginia Humanities Council,
The Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs visited Weirton, West Virginia, Thursday, Aug. 17, to hear concerns of minority residents in the Northern Panhandle. Some residents are worried about violence erupting in the state in response to neo-nazi rallies in Charlottesville.
Dr. William White is the executive director of the Office of Minority Affairs. He says so far during listening tours, minority constituents have shared the same concerns as the general public: job creation, youth retention, infrastructure, and the opioid epidemic. But the meeting in Weirton was different.
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Resident Matthew Wyatt brought up several race-related concerns. Among them, his observations of death threats directed toward participants of a Black Lives Matter event scheduled for this weekend in Charleston in response to rallies held by neo-nazi and other hate groups in Charlottesville during the weekend of Aug. 11.
“I’m not sure if anything’s been done about that,” Wyatt said afterwards. “I’m not sure that anyone’s aware of it. And I saw a chance to make sure they heard about it hear.”
Members of the minority affairs office assured Wyatt and attending residents that they would speak with Capitol police about the threats. This is the third of five tour stops planned throughout the state this year.
