Antique & Vintage Postcards

A crow's-eye sweep over early-twentieth-century Wheeling, West Virginia unfolds from this colorized panoramic cover — church spires poking above brick commercial blocks, the Ohio River glinting silver behind a handsome truss bridge, and the green hills of the Ohio side stretching to the horizon. Numbered A063 in publisher's sequence, this is the outer shell of a leporello-style souvenir accordion book, the kind a traveler named something like Earl or Mabel would have tucked into a grip after a riverboat stop. The cover image alone is a fine artifact of Wheeling's gilded industrial prime, when the city billed itself the "Nail City" and its downtown hummed with trade. Interior accordion panels extend to reveal Twelfth Street Looking East and at least two additional city views, all in period monochrome, offering a miniature documentary of the streetscape before automobiles fully took over.