Sanctuary of the Ohio Valley history

Cities were critical to regional growth; by 1830, urban life was well-established along the river in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville.

One such was Moses Frank, who died in Gallipolis in 1834.

In January 1841, Julius Ballenberg registered as a pack-peddler in Jefferson County, probably working for Marx Graf, a Jewish merchant in the town of Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), across the Ohio River.

Either in Philadelphia or Cincinnati, Elsas met the Fechheimer brothers, �a distinguished group of peddlers,� in the description of one historian, and in 1845, he married their niece Jeannette.

In 1848, Elsas closed his Portsmouth store to merge his business with that of his wife�s family in Cincinnati, where he was a successful merchant and an important leader in both the Jewish and general communities.38

Julius Ballenberg was one of the founders of the cemetery and proto-congregation organized in Wheeling in 1849, along with several other peddlers who had been licensed in Jefferson County.29

Built in 1859 as the centerpiece of the 2600 acre Henderson plantation, this impressive 17-room pre Civil War mansion has survived with all of its original furnishings.

On May 21, 1862 a tornado came through the Centre Market area of Wheeling, blowing down the steeple and partially unroofing St John’s Episcopal Church and demolishing the upper decks of the steamboat Mariner docked at Eoff’s landing, filled with union troops and supplies.

As early as 1863, five years after its founding, the congregation was regularly listed in the local church directory on the front page of the Portsmouth Times.

49 Portsmouth Times, October 1, 1864.

One of those graves belongs to Louiza Catherine Fox, who died in 1869 at the age of 13.

Rothermund died, somewhat strangely, in June 1889.

In any event, the Rothermund property was sold at sheriff’s sale in December, 1892.

37 For Frank-Silverman: Obituary of Harry Frank, Gallipolis Daily Tribune, September 17, 1900.

10 Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew (Detroit, 1970), 3: 1338-1340.

17 Myers� advertisement, dated October 14, 1793, is reprinted in Allon Schoener, The American Jewish Album, 1654 to the Present (New York, 1983), 39.

Collection, Baker Library, HBS. For background and more context, see Louise Mayo, The Ambivalent Image: Nineteenth Century America�s Perception of the Jew (Rutherford, N.J., 1988).

23 Jonathan D. Sarna, ed., The American Jewish Experience (New York, 1997), 359.

9 Joe William Trotter, Jr., River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (Lexington, Ky., 1998). Quote is on xiii.