Efforts of Wheeling Park High School Students Helping To Preserve a Piece of Local History

WHEELING — In the Wheeling Park High School machine tool technology class, the letters of the day are always “O,” “V,” “G” and “H.”

Students are working to restore some of the local historical brightness that once shone in downtown Wheeling outside the former Ohio Valley General Hospital (later Ohio Valley Medical Center) through the six-foot-tall lighted letters that hung on the side of its building.

Those seeking to preserve the hospital’s history intend for the letters to shine again, and maybe be hung on a new tower in Wheeling’s proposed Robrecht Park near WesBanco Arena.

Aaron “Gus” Fedorke, instructor for the machine tool program, said he was contacted earlier this year by Mary McKinley – the wife of former U.S. Rep. David B. McKinley and a nurse who retired from OVMC.

McKinley