A Room of Their Own: What We Know So Far About Wheeling’s Colored YMCA

The Blue Triangle Precedent

Before we can understand the scattered references to a Colored YMCA in Wheeling, it helps to remember that Wheeling’s segregated YWCA story is much better documented.

In 1921, Wheeling’s YWCA created the Blue Triangle Branch to serve African American girls and women in a city still governed by segregation. The branch opened that year at 1041 Chapline Street, later moved to 1035 Chapline, and then, in 1943, relocated to 108 12th Street. Its early leadership included women such as Mrs. Sarah Robinson, Mrs. Mindel, Mrs. Mary Banks, Miss Mary L. McMechen, and executive director Miss Escobeda Sarreals.

According to the Ohio County Public Library’s history of the branch, the Blue Triangle organized Girl Reserve Clubs at Lincoln School and offered a wide range of programs, classes, committees, and leadership opportunities for Black women and girls. Wheeling’s YWCA would not be fully integrated until June 1956.

That history gives us a working model: when the city’s mainstream Christian associations operated within segregation, Black Wheeling built parallel spaces of care, leadership, training, and belonging.

The YMCA side of that story has been harder to find.

That makes these few 1944 newspaper clippings especially important. They do not give us a full institutional history. They do not yet tell us when Wheeling’s segregated YMCA effort first began, how long it lasted, who served on its committees, how many boys used it, or whether it ever became the full center its advocates imagined.

But they do give us something.

They show that in 1944, Black Wheeling was actively pressing for a Colored YMCA. They show city council formally approving use of a public building for that purpose. They show Black civic leaders arguing that Black boys needed the same kind of recreation and supervision white boys already enjoyed. And they show, just a few months later, Dr. R. M. Hamlin offering a more cautious assessment of whether such a project could succeed without stronger facilities and community backing.

In other words, the clippings do not give us the whole story.

They give us the beginning of a trail.

The Old Hose House on Eleventh Street

On February 16, 1944, both the Wheeling News-Register and The Wheeling Intelligencer reported that city council had approved the rental of the former Eleventh Street hose house for use as a Colored YMCA. Eleventh Street would in striking distance of Lincoln School which was at Tenth and all of the other black businesses, residents and social activities of the day.

That detail matters.

This was not an abstract wish. It was not merely a social conversation. A specific public building was identified: the former fire headquarters on Eleventh Street. Council authorized arrangements to rent it at a nominal fee. The plan, according to the Intelligencer, was for the YMCA to operate the building at its own expense and as a branch or arm of the Wheeling YMCA until the city sold the property or needed it for another purpose.

It was temporary, but it was real.

The article described the proposal as coming through the Wheeling Planning Commission and being supported by Austin V. Wood, a member of that commission. Harry Jones also appeared as a spokesman for a delegation of Black citizens present at the meeting. That name alone should make us pause. Harry H. Jones would become one of Wheeling’s most important Black public voices through his “Along the Color Line” column. Here, in 1944, we see him not simply writing about community life, but appearing before city council on behalf of it.

The proposed Colored YMCA was not imagined as a luxury. It was framed as a necessity.

“The Same as White Boys”

The language of the 1944 article is revealing, and uncomfortable in the way historical language often is.

Austin V. Wood stressed the need for recreational facilities for Black boys in the community. The newspaper reported that these boys were unable to attend movies and other places of recreation in the city. That line is blunt evidence of segregation’s everyday reality.

Segregation was not only about schools, hotels, restaurants, voting, housing, or employment. It reached into childhood. It shaped the ordinary hours after school. It decided who could enter a theater, who could swim, who could gather, who could play, and who had access to supervised recreation rather than being pushed into the street.

Wood’s argument, as reported by the Intelligencer, was direct: “We must get colored boys off the street the same as white boys,” or face delinquency.

That sentence belongs in Wheeling’s historical record.

Not because we should accept all of its assumptions uncritically. The era’s language about juvenile delinquency often placed suspicion on young people rather than on the systems that excluded them. But the deeper point is clear: Black boys were being denied the protective, formative, ordinary institutions that white boys could more readily access.

The proposed Colored YMCA was an answer to that problem.

It was meant to provide recreation. It was meant to provide supervision. It was meant to provide a place where boys could gather with purpose instead of being blamed for having nowhere to go.

A Trained Worker, A Temporary Home, A Larger Dream

The February articles also tell us that the plan was not simply to unlock an old building and let boys come and go. The proposal included securing a trained worker from the national Young Men’s Christian Association to take charge of the work.

That is a major detail.

It suggests the organizers wanted legitimacy, structure, and continuity. They were not only asking for space. They were asking for a recognized program model. They wanted the same kind of professional youth work available elsewhere in the YMCA movement.

The funding model also matters. The article indicated that the Colored YMCA would be operated with funds donated by private citizens and from the Community Fund. That detail tells us something about both support and fragility. This was not, at least from the newspaper’s description, a fully public recreation program funded as an equal municipal service. It depended on private giving, community support, and the broader charitable ecosystem.

And yet the vision extended beyond the hose house.

The reports described the Eleventh Street building as temporary. Wood told council that the YMCA would move into a new colored community center when it was built after the war.

That phrase opens another window.

This was 1944. The country was still at war. Wheeling, like cities across the nation, was thinking about postwar improvements, public works, recreation, housing, schools, and civic modernization. For Black Wheeling, the question was whether that postwar future would include them fully or whether the same old segregated patterns would simply be rebuilt in newer brick.

The Colored YMCA proposal sits right there, in that in-between moment: wartime urgency, postwar promise, and segregated reality all at once.

Dr. Hamlin’s Caution

A few months later, on May 4, 1944, The Wheeling Intelligencer reported that Dr. R. M. Hamlin had addressed the Civitan Club at the Windsor Hotel.

Dr. Hamlin is already familiar to readers of our Foundation’s work. He was a physician, civic leader, and sharp critic of the conditions facing Black residents in Wheeling. He did not speak in soft edges when the subject was housing, health, schools, or social inequality.

At the Civitan Club, Hamlin stressed deplorable housing conditions and limited social facilities. When asked about the advisability of founding a Colored YMCA in Wheeling, he gave an answer that complicates the story.

According to the newspaper, Hamlin said that at the present time such a project would not get enough support from Black residents themselves. He suggested that the YMCA wait until a swimming pool and other recreational facilities were constructed near the new Lincoln School, and then help supervise their operation.

This was not a rejection of recreation. It was not indifference.

It was strategy.

Hamlin seemed to be asking whether a stand-alone Colored YMCA could survive without sufficient infrastructure, money, and community support. His answer suggests that he believed the stronger path might be to build real recreational facilities near Lincoln and then have the YMCA help operate or supervise them.

That distinction matters.

Hamlin was not denying the need. He was measuring the conditions.

Lincoln School and the Limits of Progress

Hamlin’s remarks also remind us how often Black progress in Wheeling came with a footnote.

In the same article, he discussed Lincoln High School. He acknowledged that Lincoln was one of the best buildings in the state and had a competent faculty. But he also noted that it was still classed as a “B” school in the state system.

That is an extraordinary pairing.

The new Lincoln building had opened in 1943 after years of overcrowding and advocacy. It represented a major public investment in Black education in Wheeling. And yet, even then, in Hamlin’s telling, it remained marked by limitation.

This is the story we keep finding in the archives: progress and inequality walking side by side.

A new Lincoln School, but still a segregated school.

A proposed Colored YMCA, but only in a former hose house and only temporarily.

A promise of postwar recreation, but no guarantee that Black children would receive it equally.

A city willing to approve a building, but still relying on Black citizens, private funds, and national YMCA assistance to fill gaps created by segregation.

Dr. Hamlin’s Alternative: The DeHart Hubbard Athletic Club

The strongest evidence we have found so far suggests that, whether or not Wheeling had a formally recognized segregated men’s YMCA branch, Black Wheeling clearly felt the absence of a proper recreational and social facility for boys and men. And once again, a familiar name steps forward: Dr. R. M. Hamlin.

In late 1925, both the Pittsburgh Courier and the Wheeling Intelligencer reported on the creation and early momentum of the DeHart Hubbard Athletic Club in Wheeling.

The Courier described the club as being organized in July 1925 through the efforts of Dr. Hamlin, Launbural Springs, and others who believed young Black men needed facilities for “social and athletic development.”

The article reported that the club already had roughly sixty-five boys and men as members and had raised more than six hundred dollars through a popularity contest, money intended to help secure permanent quarters for the “moral, mental and spiritual uplift” of local Black youth.

That language is important because it sounds very much like the world of the YMCA. The goal was not simply basketball. It was not merely a club room. It was recreation tied to character, discipline, fellowship, moral formation, and opportunity. In other words, Dr. Hamlin and his colleagues appear to have been building an alternative to the white-controlled recreational and civic institutions that Black Wheeling could not fully access.

The local Wheeling Intelligencer coverage makes the purpose even clearer. Under the headline “Recreation Hall Planned,” the paper reported that a drive would be launched to raise funds to build or purchase a recreation hall for the colored boys of the city. The article stated that such a building would be purchased “for the sole purpose of furnishing indoor recreation for the colored boys and men of Wheeling.”

It also admitted that such a structure had been needed in the city for many years, but had been delayed by neglect and lack of organized follow-through. By the end of 1925, the DeHart Hubbard Athletic Club had been in existence only a few months, yet already had sixty-eight members and several hundred dollars in its treasury.

The name chosen for the club was itself a statement.

William DeHart Hubbard was not just a famous athlete. He was one of the great Black athletic figures of the 1920s. A Cincinnati native and University of Michigan track star, Hubbard won the long jump at the 1924 Paris Olympics, becoming the first Black American to win Olympic gold in an individual event. He also excelled as a sprinter and jumper at Michigan, where he became one of the university’s earliest great Black lettermen and a symbol of Black excellence in a deeply segregated athletic world.

Naming a Wheeling boys’ athletic club after DeHart Hubbard placed local Black youth in conversation with national Black achievement.

It told them, in effect: your model is not limitation, but greatness.

Seen in that light, Dr. Hamlin’s effort becomes even more meaningful.

This was not charity.

It was institution-building. It was a local Black professional looking at the closed doors of Jim Crow Wheeling and trying to create another door. If the city’s recreational life was segregated, if the men’s YMCA was effectively unavailable or insufficient for Black boys and men, then Hamlin and his allies would build something of their own.

The reception held at Market Auditorium in December 1925 shows how public the effort had become. The program included an invocation by Rev. C. E. Hodges, remarks by Launbural Springs, president of the DeHart Hubbard Athletic Club, and talks by Dr. R. M. Hamlin and Rev. C. E. Hodges. Mrs. Gladys Brown sang, and H. H. Jones offered closing remarks.

This was not a private pastime.

It was a civic project, supported by church leadership, professional leadership, and community leadership.

This discovery changes the way we read the “Colored YMCA” question. The story may not be only whether Wheeling had a segregated men’s Y in the formal sense. The deeper story may be that Black Wheeling knew exactly what was missing: a room, a gym, a hall, a center, a protected space where boys and men could gather, play, organize, learn, and be seen as worthy of investment.

Dr. Hamlin’s DeHart Hubbard Athletic Club appears to have been one serious attempt to answer that need.

And the name mattered. To call it the DeHart Hubbard Athletic Club was to place Wheeling’s young Black men under the banner of an Olympic champion. It was to say that even in a city of restricted theaters, segregated schools, limited recreation, and uncertain institutional support, Black youth deserved a place named for victory.

What We Know, and What We Still Need to Find

So what do we know so far?

We know that in February 1944, Wheeling city council approved the rental of the former Eleventh Street hose house for use as a Colored YMCA.

We know that Austin V. Wood and Harry Jones were connected to the public advocacy for the project.

We know the proposal was framed around the lack of recreational facilities for Black boys in Wheeling.

We know the plan called for a trained worker from the national YMCA.

We know the building was intended as temporary, with a hoped-for move into a future colored community center after the war.

We know that by May 1944, Dr. R. M. Hamlin publicly questioned whether a Colored YMCA could receive sufficient support at that moment and suggested instead that the YMCA might later supervise recreational facilities near the new Lincoln School.

We also know that the record is still thin.

That thinness is not a failure of the story. It is part of the story.

Black institutions were often under-recorded, briefly mentioned, misnamed, or treated as side notes by the mainstream press. The Blue Triangle Branch left a clearer institutional trail. The Colored YMCA effort, at least so far, appears in scattered city council coverage, civic club reports, and passing references.

But scattered does not mean insignificant.

Sometimes scattered is exactly how the archive makes us work.

The Work of Reassembling

The Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation is committed to reassembling these fragments.

The Colored YMCA story connects directly to so many themes already present in Wheeling’s African American history: the Blue Triangle YWCA, Lincoln School, Dr. Hamlin’s reform work, the city’s segregated recreation landscape, the Boys’ Brigade and other Black youth organizations, and the larger struggle to give Black children not only classrooms, but full childhoods.

Because education was never only about school.

It was also about where a child could go after the bell rang.

It was about whether there was a safe gym, a club room, a pool, a skating event, a supervised program, a caring adult, a civic organization, a place to belong.

The Colored YMCA may have been temporary. It may have been underfunded. It may have fallen short of the larger dream its supporters imagined. We still need more evidence to know.

But these 1944 clippings prove that Black Wheeling asked the question.

Where are our boys supposed to go?

And the answer, for a brief moment at least, was an old hose house on Eleventh Street, transformed by hope into something more.

-T

Sources and Notes

• Ohio County Public Library, “YWCA Blue Triangle Branch,” accessed September 2026. https://www.ohiocountylibrary.org/history/ywca-blue-triangle-branch/5570

• The Wheeling Intelligencer, “Council Approves Rental of Hose House for Colored YMCA,” February 16, 1944, p. 2.

• Wheeling News-Register, “Colored YMCA at Fire House Is Approved by City Council,” February 16, 1944, p. 16.

• The Wheeling Intelligencer, “Dr. Hamlin Guest of Civitan Club,” May 4, 1944, p. 11.

• The Wheeling Intelligencer, “Council Digs Into Financing of Post-War Improvements,” May 24, 1944, p. 2.

• H. H. Jones, “Wheeling, W. Va.,” The Pittsburgh Courier, December 26, 1925. New_Pittsburgh_Courier_1925_12_26_5.jpg

• “Recreation Hall Planned,” The Wheeling Intelligencer, December 31, 1925. Wheeling Intelligencer, Page 2, Thursday, December 31st, 1925.pdf

• University of Michigan Athletics, “Celebrating Black History Month: William DeHart Hubbard”.

Foundation note:

This post is an initial reconstruction based on currently located newspaper references. Additional records from the Wheeling YMCA, city council files, Community Fund materials, Lincoln School records, Black church archives, Blue Triangle/YWCA records, or oral histories may help clarify whether the Eleventh Street Colored YMCA operated, how long it lasted, who staffed it, and how it related to other Black youth and recreation efforts in Wheeling.