West Virginia Independence Hall

When Virginia's convention voted to secede from the Union in 1861, the delegates from its western counties, whose economy and loyalties differed sharply from the plantation east, refused to go along. They gathered in Wheeling and, through a series of conventions held largely in this building, formed a restored government of Virginia loyal to the Union and then set about creating an entirely new state from the western counties.

That process reached its conclusion in 1863, when West Virginia was admitted to the Union as the thirty-fifth state, the only state ever formed by breaking away from another during the war. Wheeling served as the new state's first capital, and Independence Hall stood at the center of it all, earning its name as the birthplace of West Virginia.

The building was constructed in the late 1850s as a United States custom house, post office, and federal court, an elegant Italianate structure meant to project the dignity of the federal government in a busy river city. Its fine masonry, ornamental ironwork, and restored courtroom reflect the ambitions of Wheeling at the height of its commercial power.

It was precisely because it was a federal building, and Wheeling a Union-leaning city, that the statehood conventions gathered here. Over the decades that followed, the structure served various government uses before falling into decline, then was carefully restored to its Civil War-era appearance to serve as a museum and monument to the events that unfolded within its walls.

Wheeling grew into a major industrial and transportation hub on the Ohio River, a gateway between the eastern states and the frontier. The National Road reached it, steamboats and later railroads served it, and its factories turned out iron, steel, glass, and countless other goods. That wealth built the grand downtown, the suspension bridge across the Ohio, and the mansions and public buildings that still stand.

As the state's first capital, Wheeling held the seat of government in its early years before it moved elsewhere and finally settled in Charleston. The city's historic district, with Independence Hall at its heart, preserves the look and feel of that prosperous nineteenth-century era, making a walk through downtown a walk through the state's founding decades.

The Ohio River valley around Wheeling was ancestral homeland and shared hunting ground of the Lenape, the Shawnee, and the Haudenosaunee, who traveled and hunted the river corridor long before the frontier settlements rose. None of those nations is federally recognized in West Virginia today, and their descendant nations continue in other states, but the river valley they knew still shapes the city and its history.

Wheeling's whole story flows from that river. It brought the traders and settlers, powered the mills, carried the goods, and made the city a crossroads important enough to become a capital. Standing in Independence Hall today, a visitor stands at the meeting point of that geography and history, in the rooms where a new state chose its own path.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.