photo by: Joselyn King

Wheeling Park High School machine tool students Tyson Conklin, left, Lennon Butler and Colin Beary stand beside the letter “O” that once hung outside the former Ohio Valley General Hospital/Ohio Valley Medical Center building. The letters are being restored by students at WPHS.

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 has been leading an effort to preserve the history of OVGH/OVMC through the OVGH History Group.

Fedorke explained she had been aware of the machine tool class’s efforts earlier in the year to craft a new “W” and “P” for Wheeling Park to commemorate its 100th anniversary, and she asked if the students would be willing to work to restore the lighted OVGH letters.

The OVGH History Group took over care and ownership of the letters after WVU Medicine purchased the former OVMC property in 2023. After this, the city of Wheeling had allowed the letters to be stored at its operations garage, and city trucks this summer transported them to WPHS for the restoration.

The letters were hung outside OVMC in 1953, according to Fedorke.

The first thing he noticed when seeing was that the large letters were covered in porcelain. Porcelain coating can’t be repainted, and methods to stop rusting on the signage had to be rethought, he explained.

The students in the WPHS collision repair class and their teacher Don Headley then were brought into the project.

“The first thing we do is start to take out all the components, and it was fascinating,” Fedorke said. “There were old GE transformers inside, and all the glass neon tubes we had to take off and be careful with.”

Many of the tubes and parts were cracked and broken, he continued.

“We’re not going to use them, but we are trying to preserve them,” Fedorke said. “We’re going to archive them. I told Mary it would be cool to put those tubes and transformers on display. Some of them were made in the 1940s.”

He added that as for the porcelain coating, “the best you can do is clean it the best that you can.”

“The students researched that and it was kind of cool,” Fedorke said. “So it became research for us to find out how you clean it up, and what kind of stuff to clean it up.”

First, the students powerwashed the letters. Then the product “Barkeepers Friend” became their best friend, he noted. Once the cleaning was complete, the collision repair students came in to apply epoxy paint to specific tarnished areas on the letters.

The process allows the original patina to still shine through, Fedorke continued.

“The epoxy paint dirties it up and can be blended into a particular spot,” he explained. “Some of the areas were blackened by age. It’s becoming a challenge for the students to match colors to certain areas.”

The “O” and the “V” letters are now stripped down and cleaned, with the “G” and “H” perched outside the machine tool technology lab awaiting further attention.

McKinley this week brought donuts to the students working on the project and got to see the work completed thus far.

She was impressed by what she saw.

“They are looking great,” McKinley said. “They are cleaning them up and getting them ready for restoration and repair work, and I got to see them up close.”

She acknowledged the letters are not going to look shiny and new again, but noted they will have modern and more safe lighting technology installed within them.

The OVGH History Group has been working with the city to find a place for the letters, and most likely they will be placed on a tower along Heritage Trail, according to McKinley.

“The place we are looking at is at Robrecht Park,” she said.

McKinley added the timelines for the project “are loose” as there still needs to be remediation done in the area being proposed for the park.

“The students are excited about the project, and it was way fun to talk with them,” she continued. “One of them told me how impressed he was that they will be hung on a tower.

“He told me, ‘I will be able to see them and say I worked on those letters.’ Another generation has a reason to care about those letters,” McKinley said.