Mabel Mariah Johnson Hull: The Woman Who Made Black Wheeling Visible in Ink

Every so often, research gives you more than a fact. It gives you a voice.

That is what we have found in the columns of Mabel Mariah Johnson Hull.

For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, Hull’s work is not merely another newspaper discovery. It is a doorway.

Through her writing, the everyday world of Black Wheeling in the 1940s and 1950s comes back into focus: churches, teachers, mothers, students, musicians, civic clubs, YWCA girls, visiting ministers, scholarship fundraisers, weddings, graduations, conferences, recitals, baby contests, public debates, and quiet acts of service that rarely make it into traditional histories.

And at the center of it all is a Black woman columnist writing in Jim Crow Wheeling.

Brief Biography

Mabel Mariah Johnson Hull was born in Moorefield, West Virginia, in 1904, and her life carried many of the complexities of Black womanhood in the early and mid-20th century.

When Mabel Mariah Johnson was born on 29 May 1904, in Moorefield, Hardy, West Virginia, United States, her father, Thomas Jerome Johnson Sr, was 32 and her mother, Emma Bell Jones, was 18. Emma was Thomas' second wife.

Thomas Jerome Johnson Sr, 2 June 1863 – 12 August 1950

She married Frederick Burdette Hull Sr of Wheeling on 25 November 1926, in Columbus, Franklin, Ohio, United States.

They were the parents of at least 4 sons and 3 daughters.

She died on 12 January 1995, in Claremont, Sullivan, New Hampshire, United States, at the age of 90, and was buried in Sullivan, New Hampshire, United States.

Ironically, Mabel attended the Lincoln School in Keyser, WV located outside of her childhood home in nearby Mineral, WV. Later in life, Mabel would write about our very own Lincoln School in Wheeling, WV.

"The red brick school known as the Lincoln School has an interesting history. Land was acquired by the New Creek District Board of Education in 1875 on the west side of Church Street. A few years later in 1879 two additional lots, were purchased after Keyser created a separate independent school district in 1877.

The first free or public school for white Keyser pupils after the Civil War was held in the old Union Soldier’s hospital, a ca. 30 feet long, narrow, low building on what is now Argyle Street near the Potomac River.

Accurate old records are scarce. Later, pupils were taught in the newly built county courthouse. A small one-room school known as the Hill School, built in the early 1870s on Church Street, was used before the new two-story, four-room brick one was constructed on West Street for white pupils (now the location of Magistrate Court). F.P. Heskitt was appointed principal at the small Hill School and Miss Maggie Sheetz was teacher."

After “Along the Color Line”

The Foundation has already spent time with the extraordinary work of Henry H. “Harry” Jones, whose column “Along the Color Line” gave Wheeling readers a rare inside view of Black community life in the mid-1940s. Jones, a Lincoln High School teacher, wrote with clarity, urgency, pride, and civic purpose.

His column was a landmark.

Mabel Hull’s work belongs in that same conversation.

Where Jones often wrote with the voice of a teacher and public intellectual, Hull wrote with the eye of a community keeper. Her columns do not simply report events.

They gather people. They preserve names. They tell us who organized, who hosted, who taught, who sang, who traveled, who married, who graduated, who gave, who remembered, and who showed up.

That may sound ordinary until we remember the world she was writing in.

This was Wheeling under segregation. Black schools were separate. Social clubs were separate. Religious life carried much of the community’s public weight. The Blue Triangle Branch of the YWCA served Black women and girls in ways the white YWCA did not. Lincoln High School and Blessed Martin educated children in parallel systems shaped by race, religion, class, and access. Black churches were not just places of worship.

They were schools of leadership, meeting halls, civic shelters, and cultural stages.

Mabel Hull captured that world while living inside it.

Not Just A Columnist

One of the great gifts of these columns is that they show Hull before and beyond her writings.

In 1942, she appears among prominent Wheeling women touring the Wheeling News-Register plant during National Newspaper Week. That detail is almost poetic. Years before her columns became a record of Black Wheeling, Hull was inside the building where public memory was manufactured, watching the machinery of the press at work.

What makes Hull especially fascinating is that she was not simply reporting from the outside. She was embedded in the life she documented. She worked full-time while writing columns for the Wheeling News-Register and, during the late 1940s, also wrote “Breezes from Wheeling” for The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most important Black newspapers in the country.

Her subjects ranged from Lincoln School and the Blue Triangle Branch of the YWCA to church affairs, visiting dignitaries, Black achievement, local organizations, and the ordinary movements of community life that rarely received sustained attention in white newspapers.

In 1943, she appears as an adviser to the Girl Reserves of the Blue Triangle Branch YWCA. That matters deeply. Hull was not merely observing Black women’s civic life from the outside.

She was participating in it.

She helped shape young women in the very institutions she would later document.

In 1945, she appears again, this time as a letter writer in the public opinion pages. Her signed letter about war, peace, Japan, and the postwar world shows a woman willing to step beyond “society notes” and address the urgent political questions of her time.

By the time Hull’s later columns are running, she is already a civic participant, a YWCA adviser, a reader, a thinker, and a public voice.

That is why these articles matter. Mabel M. Hull was not simply writing about Black Wheeling. She was part of the infrastructure that made Black Wheeling move.

Her Style

Hull’s writing has a rhythm all its own.

She could be warm and devotional when writing about mothers, church women, and missionary workers. She could be sharp and civic-minded when writing about traffic lights near Lincoln School. She could be cultured and demanding when she scolded the community for not turning out in greater numbers to hear a gifted artist.

She could be reflective when books, patriotism, or the Freedom Train led her into larger questions about American ideals.

She wrote with the familiar cadence of someone who expected her readers to know the people she named. That is part of the charm and part of the historical value. Her columns were not written for distant scholars.

They were written for neighbors.

That intimacy is what makes them so powerful now.

A modern reader may see a list of names. Hull’s original readers saw families, pews, porches, choirs, classrooms, club rooms, and familiar faces. The Foundation’s task is to bridge that gap: to help today’s readers understand that those names were not footnotes.

They were the living architecture of Black Wheeling.

The Institutions She Preserved

Again and again, Hull’s columns bring us back to the institutions that sustained Black life in Wheeling.

There is Lincoln High School, still standing in the 1940s as the central public educational institution for Black students in the city. Hull writes of graduates, teachers, alumni, safety concerns, state teacher meetings, and scholarship efforts.

Mabel's son, Garrett "Gary" Hull, appears in this 1950 clipping of a performance presented by the students of Lincoln School.

There is Blessed Martin, the segregated Catholic school that served Black children for a short but meaningful chapter in Wheeling’s educational history.

There is Macedonia Baptist Church, appearing through Bible school, pastoral support, missionary leadership, and community gatherings.

There is Wayman A.M.E. Church, hosting regional conference life and anchoring Black Methodist leadership.

There is Simpson Memorial Methodist Church, showing up as both sacred space and civic space.

There is the Blue Triangle Branch YWCA, one of the most important recurring threads in Hull’s work.

Through the Blue Triangle, we see Black women and girls engaged in leadership training, conferences, citizenship education, civil rights language, mother-daughter programs, and regional networks that stretched beyond Wheeling.

There are Black sororities, scouting efforts, musical recitals, literary reflections, fraternal gatherings, baby contests, and scholarship drives.

Taken together, Hull’s columns show a community that segregation tried to confine, but could not flatten.

The Everyday As Evidence

One of the mistakes people make when reading old society columns is assuming they are light history.

They are not.

In a community whose public record was often incomplete, dismissive, or filtered through white institutions, these columns are evidence.

They show Black Wheeling’s self-organizing power.

They show who was trusted.

They show who led.

They show which buildings mattered.

They show which children were celebrated. They show what adults wanted young people to become.

A baby contest becomes evidence of scholarship fundraising.

A recital becomes evidence of Black cultural aspiration.

A church conference becomes evidence of regional religious power.

A wedding becomes evidence of Black professional networks.

A traffic-light column becomes evidence of concern for Black children’s safety near Lincoln School.

A graduate party becomes evidence of adults publicly investing pride, food, music, and advice into the next generation.

Hull understood, whether explicitly or instinctively, that community life is made out of these moments.

A Black Woman Writing In Public

We should not pass too quickly over what it meant for Mabel Hull to be a Black woman writing in a Wheeling newspaper during this period.

This was not a neutral platform. Newspapers decided what counted as news, whose lives deserved space, and which communities could be seen in full. The fact that Hull’s writing appeared at all is significant. The fact that she used that space to record Black life with care is even more significant.

She did not write as though Black Wheeling was marginal.

She wrote as though it was full.

Full of institutions. Full of leaders. Full of arguments. Full of music. Full of children. Full of faith. Full of ambition. Full of grief and celebration. Full of people whose names belonged in print.

That is a form of resistance.

Not loud resistance, necessarily.

Not always protest language.

But a steady insistence that Black life was worthy of record.

A Treasure Map For The Foundation

For EBSHF, Hull’s columns are not just articles. They are a research engine.

Every column opens doors.

A name can lead to a census record, an obituary, a yearbook, a church anniversary program, a photograph, a military record, a deed, a school roster, a family story, or an oral history.

A club mention can lead to a forgotten organization.

A church event can lead to a regional conference.

A recital can lead to a touring artist.

A scholarship fundraiser can lead to a Lincoln graduate whose story has not yet been told.

This is why the Foundation exists.

Not simply to admire the past, but to recover it carefully. To connect scattered evidence. To restore context. To preserve names before they fade. To show that African American history in Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley was not small, even when the surviving record tries to make it look that way.

Mabel Hull gives us leads by the dozens.

She gives us the Blue Triangle. She gives us Lincoln. She gives us Blessed Martin. She gives us Macedonia, Wayman, and Simpson. She gives us women’s clubs, teachers’ associations, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Girl Reserves, scout work, musicians, pastors, mothers, doctors, students, and everyday citizens doing the work of community survival.

Why This Matters Now

The deeper we go into Wheeling’s Black history, the more one truth keeps returning: the record is there, but it is scattered.

Some of it sits in newspapers. Some in family albums. Some in church basements. Some in school programs. Some in yearbooks. Some in oral memory. Some in public archives. Some in places nobody has thought to look yet.

Mabel Hull’s column helps gather those scattered pieces into view.

She was, in her own time, doing a version of what the Foundation now does: preserving Black Wheeling by naming it.

That is why this discovery feels so important. It is not only that Hull wrote about many things. It is that she wrote from within a community that was too often written about from the outside, or ignored altogether.

Her work reminds us that history is not only made by mayors, boards, courts, and buildings.

It is also made by the person who records the meeting, names the children, praises the artist, remembers the elder, honors the graduate, and tells the city: this happened here.

The Gift Of Mabel M. Hull

Mabel M. Hull gave Black Wheeling something precious.

She gave it ink.

She gave it visibility.

She gave it continuity.

And now, decades later, she gives the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation something equally precious: a map.

Not a finished map. A living one. A map full of names to chase, stories to verify, institutions to study, and families to reconnect with their own public record.

In the long arc of Wheeling’s African American history, Mabel Hull deserves to be remembered as more than a columnist.

She was a witness.

She was a participant.

She was a recorder of community dignity in a segregated city.

And because she wrote, we can still hear Black Wheeling speaking.

We will provide an additional blog post that summarizes her all of her columns in the Wheeling News-Register for those interested in learning more about the world in which she lived and wrote.

-T

Sources and Notes

• This post draws from the surviving newspaper columns and related clippings of Mabel M. Hull published in the Wheeling News-Register between 1942 and 1954, including her later community columns documenting Black churches, Lincoln High School, Blessed Martin, the Blue Triangle Branch YWCA, civic organizations, music, women’s clubs, youth programs, and social life in segregated Wheeling.

• Citation Note: Mabel M. Hull scrapbooks, Archives and Special Collections, Ohio County Public Library, Wheeling, WV.

• Lincoln School in Keyser - https://www.wvnews.com/mineralnews/historybits-the-lincoln-school/article_94835f96-e246-11ef-a498-cf0ba37d25ce.html

• Genealogy