“Wheeling in Tomorrow-Land”: Harry Hamm’s 1958 Front-Page Vision for the Future of the City
What should the city become by 1980?
At the start of 1958, Wheeling’s newspaper readers opened the front page and found something larger than a daily headline.
Harry Hamm, editor in chief of the Wheeling News-Register, launched a 10-part series explaining the city’s long-range Master Plan for development. The series ran across multiple days, beginning January 5 and concluding January 15, 1958. It was not tucked away on an inside civic page. It was presented as front-page business, the kind of public conversation the paper believed the city needed to have with itself.
The subject was nothing less than Wheeling’s future.
Where should people live?
Where should industry go?
How should downtown survive?
What would be done about flood danger, old housing, traffic congestion, parking, urban renewal, zoning, and public improvements?
Could Wheeling remain the commercial center of the Upper Ohio Valley, or would it slowly lose its young people, businesses, and influence to other places?
For the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, this series is fascinating not simply because of what Hamm and the planners saw. It is fascinating because of what they did not fully see.
In 1958, Wheeling was only a few years removed from the closing of Lincoln School as a K-12 institution. Brown v. Board of Education had been decided in 1954. Local Black students were navigating the realities of desegregation. Black families were still living inside the long shadow of segregated housing, employment discrimination, and urban neglect. Dr. R. M. Hamlin had already been warning the city about deplorable housing conditions. The Wheeling Housing Authority and urban renewal programs were becoming increasingly important forces in the lives of low-income families.
So when Hamm wrote about “the future of Wheeling,” the Foundation must ask a deeper question:
Whose future?
That is what makes this series so valuable.
It gives us a citywide vision at mid-century. It shows us what civic leaders and professional planners believed Wheeling needed. It also gives us a document against which we can read the stories of Black Wheeling: the neighborhoods, schools, churches, homes, and families whose lives were often described indirectly through words like “blight,” “redevelopment,” “flood plain,” “relocation,” and “urban renewal.”
1. Wheeling in 1980: A Glimpse of “Tomorrow-Land”
The first article was almost cinematic.
Hamm invited readers to “come browse” through the city’s Master Plan and imagine Wheeling in 1980. He described a city transformed: clear riverbanks, a cleaner Ohio River, industrial districts reshaped, old neighborhoods replaced or redeveloped, expressways carrying traffic, and a city more orderly than the crowded Wheeling of 1958.
It was a dream of modernization.
The article imagined the southern approach to Wheeling revealing the industrial might of the community. Old city blocks would give way to sprawling factories and manufacturing plants, with wide parking spaces and a river terminal serving barge traffic. Wheeling Island would become one of the busiest spots in the city, but the planners also recognized that flood protection for the Island might not be economically feasible. That meant gradual redevelopment into uses more compatible with flood risk.
From the opening installment, Hamm presented planning as both necessity and imagination. The Master Plan, he explained, was not the final word on what the city desired. Times change. Thinking changes. Plans must change. But the plan was intended to give direction to growth, to place public dollars more wisely, and to prevent costly mistakes.
That idea matters for our Foundation’s work because the language of planning often sounds neutral. But planning is never neutral. A city plan decides what is preserved and what is sacrificed. It decides which neighborhoods are treated as assets and which are treated as obstacles. It decides whether old communities are repaired, replaced, or erased.
For Black Wheeling, the first question is unavoidable: when the city imagined 1980, where did it imagine Black families?
2. Population: The City Was Losing Its Young
The second article focused on population, and its tone was more anxious.
Hamm reported that while the United States had grown during the World War II and postwar years, Wheeling had not shared in that growth. From 1930 to 1950, Wheeling, Ohio County, and the Wheeling-Steubenville metropolitan area had leveled off or declined while the national population increased.
The planners warned that Wheeling’s population loss should not be dismissed lightly. Between 1930 and 1950, the city lost 2,468 people even though the nation was growing substantially. More troubling, the losses were concentrated among the young. Many who left were between ages 15 and 45, and many children under 10 were also part of the out-migration.
That meant Wheeling was not merely losing numbers. It was losing future workers, parents, homeowners, business owners, and civic leaders.
Hamm highlighted one of the planners’ most memorable comparisons: communities, like living organisms, must grow and develop. If they do not, they deteriorate. There is no true standing still.
The population study also looked at education. The article noted that Wheeling’s overall educational level was high, but that the area lagged the national level in college attainment and trailed Charleston in that category as well. The planners connected population growth, jobs, education, and opportunity. New jobs were needed to hold the young “at home” and to attract outsiders.
For the Foundation, this population article connects directly to the Black educational story.
By 1958, Wheeling had already dismantled Lincoln as a full K-12 school. The city had generations of Black educational achievement behind it, from the colored school founded by the Board of Education in 1866, to John W. West and Robert West, to the long Lincoln School tradition. But in Hamm’s population frame, education appears mostly as an economic statistic.
That is one of the silences we must listen for.
When a city loses young people, it loses everyone. But Black youth faced the additional burdens of segregation, limited housing choice, and narrower job opportunity. If planners wanted Wheeling to keep its young, the city also needed to ask whether Black young people had a fair reason to stay.
3. Economy: The Valley’s Boom and Wheeling’s Warning Signs
The third article moved from population to economy.
Hamm summarized the planners’ belief that the Ohio Valley was positioned for industrial expansion. Mining, power plants, chemicals, and metals indicated the possibility of a future employment boom. But the planners also warned that Wheeling could not simply assume it would benefit from that boom.
The city had natural advantages, but also serious limitations: an aging physical plant, difficult topography, flood-prone lowlands, and a shortage of suitable industrial land.
The planners argued that Wheeling needed concerted action: sound planning, physical redevelopment, economic strategy, and careful programming. The article suggested that the trade and service sectors might be more immediately responsive than heavy industry, but that industrial development could not be neglected.
This article is especially important because it connected economics to land. To attract industry, Wheeling needed sites. To create sites, it might need flood protection, hillside development, more intensive use of available land, slum clearance, redevelopment, land assembly, and land reservation.
There it is: “slum clearance.”
That phrase is one of the hinges of the whole series.
To a planner, slum clearance might mean removing obsolete housing and preparing land for higher use. To a family, it might mean displacement. To a Black neighborhood, it could mean the loss of a social world that had been built under difficult conditions and against heavy odds. Churches, corner stores, fraternal halls, porches, alley friendships, and survival networks could vanish under the clean language of redevelopment.
The Foundation’s work asks us to hold both truths: some housing was genuinely unsafe and needed intervention, and yet redevelopment could harm the very communities it claimed to help if those communities did not share power in the planning.
4. Land Use: A City With Little Room to Spare
The fourth article dealt with land use, and it revealed one of Wheeling’s most stubborn realities: the city did not have much usable land.
The planners found that Wheeling had relatively little land available for new development, only about 8 percent. The city’s shape, hills, river, creek valleys, industrial corridors, older neighborhoods, and flood-prone areas all placed limits on expansion.
Hamm reported that future urban development would have to take place largely in outlying areas. The planners identified land on slopes under 20 percent that could be made accessible and suitable for development. They also noted that some vacant usable land in the Wheeling Creek valley would require flood protection before it could be developed.
This article speaks directly to the physical personality of Wheeling. The city is beautiful because of its hills, river, and narrow valleys. But those same features make planning difficult. Wheeling could not expand like a flat Midwestern city. It had to fit itself into tight terrain.
The article also warned that the built-up conditions of the Wheeling Creek valley between Triadelphia and Elm Grove had often disregarded the danger of flash floods. The planners recommended flood-control dams to protect such areas.
For EBSHF readers, land use is not just a technical subject. It helps explain why certain neighborhoods became crowded, why flood-prone land mattered, why low-income families were often pushed into the least desirable areas, and why “available land” became such a powerful phrase. When a city has little room to spare, the question becomes sharper:
Whose land gets protected, whose land gets redeveloped, and whose neighborhood becomes negotiable?
5. Floods: The Water Under Every Plan
The fifth article focused on flood control, and it was one of the most consequential installments.
Hamm explained that Wheeling residents were so accustomed to flood danger that some did not feel the fear an outsider would feel. The planners even observed that some residents may have believed facing common danger created a kind of comradeship. But the planners warned that this familiarity could be dangerous.
Wheeling’s flood problem was not merely seasonal inconvenience. It depressed land and property values. It limited development. It reduced the tax base. It made improvement harder. The planners noted that Wheeling had a shortage of land for business, commerce, and industry, but that better use of suitable land depended on protecting downtown, Center Wheeling, and South Wheeling from floods.
The numbers were stark. The Wheeling Floodwall Authority had compiled direct flood damage between 1873 and 1948 at more than $108 million, not including indirect losses in business, trade, and production. The report also stated that the largest depressed areas were on the Island and in Center and South Wheeling.
The planners recommended that Wheeling Island, because of the age of its structures and the difficulty of financing reconstruction, be zoned as a flood plain area and gradually shifted toward open uses, primarily recreational, as existing uses were abandoned. Downtown, Center Wheeling, and South Wheeling, by contrast, were recommended for floodwall protection.
For the Foundation, this section is loaded with meaning.
Floods are natural events. But vulnerability to floods is often social. Poorer families often live in the more vulnerable places. Black families, restricted by discrimination and economic exclusion, often had fewer choices about where they could live. So when the city discussed flood-prone land, depressed property, and redevelopment, it was also discussing people’s homes, whether or not it named them.
The flood article reminds us that housing justice and environmental risk have always been connected.
6. Thoroughfares: Roads, Access, and the Enlarged City
The sixth article reviewed the Thoroughfare Plan.
Hamm opened with a striking comparison: it took about 25 minutes to drive from Moundsville, Shadyside, or St. Clairsville to downtown Wheeling. If proposed highway developments became reality, people could reach Wheeling from places like Claysville, Pennsylvania, or Cadiz, Ohio, in the same amount of time.
The planners believed improved roads would enlarge Wheeling’s service area. Downtown would become more accessible to a larger population. Industry and commercial trade in the Ohio Valley could be “tapped” by Wheeling if bottlenecks were removed and access improved.
This article was about more than traffic. It was about regional dominance.
Wheeling wanted to remain the center of a 250,000-person community. It wanted to pull customers, workers, goods, and influence from the surrounding valley. Roads were the arteries of that ambition.
But road building also has a human cost. Expressways and new thoroughfares can connect some people while cutting through the lives of others. Nationally, mid-century highway planning often harmed Black neighborhoods and low-income communities. The Wheeling article does not center that concern, but our Foundation must ask it.
Which neighborhoods were made more accessible?
Which were divided?
Which residents gained mobility, and which were moved out of the way?
The archive also includes a February 26, 1958 follow-up article reporting on Wheeling’s progress in its Workable Program for Urban Renewal. That piece noted completion of a relocation housing survey, a new fire prevention code, a neighborhood development plan, and upcoming subdivision, land-use, thoroughfare, zoning, and public improvement measures. In other words, the January series was not merely abstract.
By February, the city was actively reporting progress to federal authorities so it could remain eligible for funds related to slum clearance, redevelopment, urban renewal, and public housing.
That connection is crucial.
The roads, zoning, land use, and redevelopment plans were becoming machinery.
7. Business and Industrial Sites: Holding the Valley’s Trade
The seventh article described the future land-use plan for business and industry.
Hamm wrote that an expanded commercial district, additional industrial sites, and new residential neighborhoods were “musts” if Wheeling expected to grow. The plan anticipated a population of 75,300 residents by 1980 and expected thousands of workers in the planning area.
The planners stated that the Wheeling community intended to improve its position as the principal trade center for the area. It wanted to hold present business and capture its share of new business resulting from industrial expansion in the Ohio Valley.
To do that, the plan proposed industrial sections and redevelopment of central areas so land could be released for industrial, commercial, and some residential use. The planners believed that, after sound redevelopment, some sections could attract new plants that would supplement the basic manufacturing already expanding in the valley.
Again, the article’s language is forward-looking. It speaks of expansion, efficiency, commerce, access, and growth.
But for the Foundation, the deeper historical question remains: what did “redevelopment” mean on the ground?
By 1958, Black Wheeling had already seen how public decisions shaped opportunity. The colored school had been created by the Board of Education in 1866 and praised in federal Freedmen’s Bureau records by 1867. Lincoln School had educated generations. Yet by the late 1950s, desegregation and urban renewal were reshaping Black institutional life. The city was asking where industry and commerce should go. Black families were asking where they could live, work, worship, and belong.
A city’s business plan is also a map of power.
8. Housing: Vast Areas Planned for New Residential Development
The eighth article reviewed residential land use.
The headline said “Vast Areas Planned for New Housing.” Hamm explained that the plan contemplated new urban residential sections, including self-contained neighborhoods of detached single-family homes. The article identified areas near Elm Grove, Greenwood Cemetery, Wheeling Creek, and other outlying or hilltop locations. It also discussed two-family sections, single-family sections, and density limits.
This installment is especially important because housing sits at the center of nearly every theme the Foundation has been exploring.
The planners wanted balanced, modern neighborhoods. They wanted to prepare for growth.
They wanted to organize land use more carefully. But this was also a moment when the city’s older neighborhoods, including neighborhoods where Black residents lived, were being evaluated through the language of obsolescence, density, redevelopment, and clearance.
New housing in the hills could symbolize aspiration. It could also signal movement away from older urban neighborhoods. For some families, suburban-style development meant opportunity. For others, it meant the city was investing its future elsewhere.
This is where Wheeling’s Black housing history becomes indispensable.
If the city was planning new residential areas, were Black families expected to have equal access to them? Were they included in the imagined self-contained neighborhoods? Or were they primarily present in the plan as residents of blighted districts to be relocated, managed, or cleared?
Those questions are not unfair to ask. They are necessary.
Because the future of Wheeling was not only about land. It was about who would be allowed to inhabit the future.
9. Downtown Parking: The Car Arrives as a Planning Problem
The ninth article dealt with downtown parking and several “miscellaneous” studies.
Hamm reported that Wheeling’s downtown parking needs were expected to increase by about 150 percent over the next 20 years. Improved highways would make downtown more accessible, but only if the shopping district also became more convenient and attractive.
The planners estimated that thousands of additional parking spaces would be needed for peak periods. They also predicted that eventually, and perhaps in the not-too-distant future, curb parking would disappear from much of downtown, roughly from Tenth Street to Sixteenth Street and from Chapline to Water Street. Streets would need to carry more traffic, and curb parking would be sacrificed.
The recommendations were practical: study downtown land use and circulation, stop meter-feeding, increase turnover, coordinate merchants and truckers, provide short-term shopper parking close to stores, move employee parking farther out, require off-street parking and loading for new construction, and plan larger parking areas near highway exits.
This is a wonderfully mid-century problem.
The city wanted cars because cars brought shoppers. But cars also threatened the very downtown they were supposed to serve. Parking lots could help business, but they could also hollow out the urban fabric. Buildings could be removed for parking. Streets could become more hostile to pedestrians. Downtown could begin serving automobiles as much as people.
For EBSHF, the parking article matters because downtown was not merely a commercial zone. It was part of the daily geography of Black Wheeling: work, shopping, transportation, institutions, entertainment, churches, lodges, and schools all connected to the central city.
When planners redesigned downtown for traffic and parking, they redesigned how people moved through public life.
10. The Final Article: Planning Is Only a Guidepost
The tenth and final article pulled the series together.
Hamm wrote that almost all citizens are interested in having their community be a good place to live and work. The Master Plan was meant to make that interest a reality.
But he also emphasized that preparation of a comprehensive plan was only the first step. The plan had to be frequently reappraised and revised so that it could continue to represent the best program for future development.
The final article listed additional studies that still needed to be done: fiscal analysis, school sites, public and semi-public facilities, capital improvements, neighborhood analysis, transit studies, public and low-rent housing needs, airport planning, subdivision regulation, zoning, and more.
This ending is incredibly important.
Hamm and the planners were not saying, “The future is solved.” They were saying, “The future requires continuing work.” They warned that Wheeling had to face the question of whether it would go ahead with planning and obtain the benefits, or relax under the misconception that the necessary planning had already been done.
The planners summarized the philosophy clearly: planning is a continuous process requiring deliberation and action by officials and citizens. A master plan is a guide.
For the Foundation, that is the sentence that opens the door.
Officials and citizens.
Which citizens?
Which officials?
Which neighborhoods?
Which voices?
Which records?
Which memories?
If planning is continuous, then history must also be continuous. The city cannot plan honestly without knowing whose lives were affected by earlier plans.
The Larger Meaning: A City Trying to Save Itself
Harry Hamm’s 10-part series captured Wheeling at a turning point.
The city was proud, anxious, ambitious, and worried. It wanted growth. It feared decline. It wanted to remain the center of a large regional community. It knew it was losing young people. It knew downtown had problems. It knew flood danger depressed property and investment. It knew old housing and blighted areas could not simply be ignored. It knew roads, parking, industry, land use, and housing were all connected.
That alone makes the series historically valuable.
But for the Foundation, the series becomes even more important when read beside our prior work.
We have written about the creation of Wheeling’s colored public school in 1866. We have written about John W. West and the Freedmen’s Bureau. We have written about Lincoln School, desegregation, the last graduating classes, Dr. Hupp, Dr. Hamlin, Hil-Dar, Lincoln Homes, the Wheeling Housing Authority, and the long struggle over Black housing and public investment.
Hamm’s series shows us how the city talked about the future from the top down.
Our work helps recover what that future looked like from the ground up.
Both are necessary.
Questions the Foundation Should Ask Readers
When Wheeling imagined its future in 1958, whose voices were included in that imagination?
How did urban renewal language such as “blight,” “slum clearance,” and “redevelopment” affect Black neighborhoods and low-income families?
Did the city’s plans for new residential areas include equal access for Black families after desegregation?
How did highway and traffic planning reshape older neighborhoods and downtown life?
What happened to families who lived in areas targeted for clearance or redevelopment?
How did flood risk shape where poor and Black families could live?
What records exist showing relocation plans, public housing needs, and neighborhood surveys?
Were Black churches, civic groups, educators, and neighborhood leaders consulted in planning decisions?
How did the closure of Lincoln as a K-12 school in 1956 intersect with housing and urban renewal planning in the late 1950s?
What parts of Hamm’s imagined 1980 Wheeling actually came true, and what parts were never realized?
Why This Belongs in the Foundation’s Archive
This series is not just a planning document summarized by a newspaper editor.
It is a mirror.
It shows Wheeling trying to look twenty years ahead. It shows a city that knew it had problems and wanted solutions. It shows civic ambition. It shows faith in planning. It shows mid-century confidence in roads, redevelopment, zoning, floodwalls, parking, and professional expertise.
But it also shows the limits of that vision.
For EBSHF, the task is not to dismiss Hamm’s series. The task is to complete the conversation.
Because the future of Wheeling was not only decided in master plans, newspaper columns, or government offices. It was also decided in Black classrooms, church basements, kitchen tables, public housing offices, union halls, neighborhood streets, and family decisions about whether to stay or leave.
The planners asked what Wheeling might look like in 1980.
Our Foundation asks something just as important:
Who had to live through the plan?
-T
Sources and Notes
Primary source archive supplied by the user: Wheeling News-Register, Harry Hamm 10-part series on Wheeling’s long-range Master Plan for development, January 5-15, 1958.
Installment 1: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 11, Sunday, January 5, 1958.
Installment 2: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 5, Monday, January 6, 1958.
Installment 3: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 2, Tuesday, January 7, 1958.
Installment 4: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 4, Wednesday, January 8, 1958.
Installment 5: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 5, Thursday, January 9, 1958.
Installment 6: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 9, Friday, January 10, 1958.
Installment 7: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 10, Sunday, January 12, 1958.
Installment 8: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 3, Monday, January 13, 1958.
Installment 9: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 4, Tuesday, January 14, 1958.
Installment 10: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 4, Wednesday, January 15, 1958.
Additional related article in supplied archive: Wheeling News-Register, Page 1 and Page 3, Wednesday, February 26, 1958, reporting Wheeling’s progress under its Workable Program for Urban Renewal and pending submission of subdivision, land-use, thoroughfare, zoning, and public-improvement measures.
Additional interpretive context drawn from prior Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation research and blog work on Lincoln School, desegregation, Dr. R. M. Hamlin’s housing advocacy, the Wheeling Housing Authority, Hil-Dar, Lincoln Homes, Black housing conditions, and African American education and community life in Wheeling.
