Photos Provided Nearly 30 yearbooks that chronicle the academic and social adventures of students at the then Ohio Valley General Hospital (OVGH) School of Nursing are seeing the light of day once more thanks to Jerry Genther, a longtime employee of OVGH and its later incarnation, the Ohio Valley Medical Center. Genther said he rescued the books – which range in date from the late 1940s to the late 1960s – from the garbage during a time of hospital transition in the 1970s. This is a common way that institutional artifacts find their way into private collections, according to Wheeling historian Margaret Brennan.

WHEELING — The skeleton is accounted for. The remains of a teen girl — possibly born around the time of the Civil War — were retrieved from the already shuttered School of Nursing as Ohio Valley Medical Center itself ceased operations in late 2019.

Within weeks of the abrupt closure, that entire skeleton and additional bones used to train generations of medical professionals were cremated and buried with solemnity at Mt. Calvary Cemetery.

Alternatively tucked away are the hospital’s board minutes and a variety of paper and physical artifacts from nearly 130 years of community healthcare.

Margaret Brennan, a Wheeling historian, was part of the team that went into the buildings early on to do what amounted to rescue preservation. She remembered Laura Carroll, archivist for Ohio County Public Library, literally carrying some of the more unwieldy items down Chapline Street to their new, climate-regulated home in the library basement.

They didn’t get everything, however, Brennan noted. And, now, a clock is likely ticking.

A regional cancer-treatment center that would involve razing the former facilities is in the planning stages. Brennan said it’s time for historians to meet with the city – which took ownership of the campus after Ohio Valley Medical Center (OVMC) closed – and arrange for a closer, slower look.

“I want to make sure someone does a walk through,” Brennan said. “Those are such huge buildings, it’s hard to tell what’s tucked into corners.”

FAR-FLUNG HOMES

It might also be time to check into what’s already been collected unofficially, she said. Brennan suspects a fair bit of OVMC materials are already stashed in homes throughout the Ohio Valley. She said that’s often what happens when iconic institutions shut down.

Brennan gave, as an example, the 1998 closure of Stone & Thomas, a Wheeling-headquartered department store with a flagship facility in the downtown.

“Somebody called (a now-deceased friend of mine) and said, ‘They’re pitching stuff out the window,'” Brennan said of how one collection of store memorabilia of which she is aware came to be. “He dump dived and got all sorts of stuff.”

As if to give evidence to her words, a collection of about 30 yearbooks from OVMC’s School of Nursing – which opened as the state’s first such training program in 1892, while the institution was called City Hospital – recently came to light.

Ironically, the books might not have survived if they hadn’t been the victims of an earlier time of transition, according to Jerry Genther of the Mt. Olive community of Marshall County. A military-trained medic, Genther worked for the hospital from 1959 to 1996 – as an orderly, then as a boiler technician and, finally, as shift engineer.

With his boss’s permission, he said he pulled the books out of the garbage in the 1970s, during the transition from OVGH to OVMC and not long before the School of Nursing shut down in 1988. The volumes range from the late 1940s to the late 1960s.

“At the time, I was working at the boiler plant and they gave them the toss,” he said, noting another guy from the store room also got some of the books but later sold them. “I kept thinking about all those nurses and all the time they spent training and I thought they should be remembered.”

Genther said the student nurses and staff nurses were a wonderful part of his working experience.

“They liked people, and they did all they could,” Genther said of still taking pleasure in flipping through the volumes and seeing faces he remembers from decades ago. “I never saw a nurse not with a smile or trying to help somebody.”

He remembered that the student nurses in particular often had quite a sense of humor, as well. Some of the yearbook photos were staged and involved other employees – including him.

“The book that I wanted, I don’t have,” he said. “It shows me out in front of the hospital posing as a patient in a bed in front of the turnaround with medical people all around.”

HERE & THERE

Brennan considers such private collections as Genther’s a potential treasure trove. It’s hard to tell what OVMC or other Wheeling memorabilia is here and there, she said. She noted she recently became aware of a collection of Warwood minstrel programs that had been stored under an area resident’s bed.

She’s also seeing more bits and pieces of an amusement park that graced a small island near Warwood for a couple years in the early 1900s showing up. Some clay infrastructure pipes from the flood-destroyed development are serving as decor in a neighbor’s front yard, she said with a laugh.

“The boaters know,” she said of what amounts to an ongoing, Wild West type of collection site.

But, she hopes that a city museum – long hoped for but not imminent – will someday lure all sorts of artifacts out of attics and closets for possible inclusion.

“People do rescue our histories,” Brennan said of these mysterious independent collections. “Now, the idea is to bring it back together, and I think the library is the place to bring it for now.”