Welcome to the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation

Welcome, and thank you for visiting the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation.

This website is more than a digital home for a new organization. It is the beginning of a shared journey to preserve, document, interpret, and celebrate African American history in Wheeling, West Virginia, and throughout the Upper Ohio Valley. It is a place for memory, learning, discovery, reflection, and connection.

The Foundation was created from a simple but powerful belief: our history matters, and it must be preserved with care. Across families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, archives, photographs, newspapers, oral histories, and community memories, there are stories that deserve to be protected and shared. Some of those stories are well known. Many are still waiting to be found, remembered, researched, and brought into the light.

Through this website, we hope visitors will learn about the people, places, institutions, and experiences that shaped African American life in Wheeling and the region. We will share stories about education, community leadership, family history, local schools, churches, civic life, culture, perseverance, achievement, and the long struggle for dignity, opportunity, and recognition. We will also share updates about our research, archival work, oral history efforts, exhibits, programs, partnerships, and future plans.

Our goal is not only to collect history, but to steward it. That means preserving materials responsibly, honoring the people and families connected to them, telling stories with accuracy and context, and making history accessible to students, families, researchers, educators, descendants, and the broader public. We believe that when history is preserved well, it strengthens identity, deepens understanding, and connects generations.

We hope to build a trusted foundation for learning and public memory.

Over time, we envision archives, oral histories, educational resources, public programs, exhibits, publications, scholarships, partnerships, and community-centered projects that help ensure this history is not lost, overlooked, or forgotten. We want the Foundation to become a place where people can bring stories, ask questions, discover connections, and see themselves reflected in the historical record.

You can help make this vision real.

You can help by sharing family stories, photographs, school records, programs, newspaper clippings, church histories, yearbooks, documents, artifacts, and memories. You can help by volunteering, connecting us with elders and community historians, supporting our programs, partnering with us, encouraging young people to learn this history, and returning often to follow the work as it grows. Every lead, memory, document, conversation, and act of support matters.

Most of all, you can help by believing that this history is worth preserving.

We are excited about what is ahead. This website will continue to grow as the Foundation grows. Our blog will be one of the places where we share new discoveries, behind-the-scenes updates, historical reflections, research questions, community stories, and progress on the Foundation’s work.

So please come back often. Visit, read, learn, share, and invite others to join us. The story of African American history in Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley is rich, powerful, unfinished, and still unfolding — and we cannot wait to share more of it with you.

-T