Wheeling Machine Products Inc history

Named in honor of President George Washington, the boat was completed in 1816 and launched later that year.

In 1840, Miflin M. Marsh, a Quaker, founded Marsh Wheeling.

Twenty-two men split from Belmont Nail Works (a local nail factory) in 1852, to create Baily, Woodward, and Company, later known as LaBelle Iron Works.

In 1863, a new formula developed in Wheeling revolutionized the industry.

The sign advertised the company’s Mail Pouch chewing tobacco, which was brought to market in 1879.

Long before the highway billboard of today existed, Wheeling’s Bloch Brothers started a campaign in 1890 offering farmers to regularly paint their barns with the company’s iconic “Treat Yourself to the Best” sign.

Page 6 of Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, published in Wheeling, West Virginia on Thursday, August 22nd, 1901

Located on several blocks between 31st and 33rd streets in South Wheeling, the company was created when two existing pottery and tile companies, Riverside Pottery and Wheeling Pottery, merged in 1912.

The expansion of the company prompted opening a brand-new building on 19th Street in Wheeling in 1914.

A few months after the US officially declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, the newly-created Office of Alien Property Custodian began to seize the assets of German companies operating in the US.10

In 1921, after a United States judge allowed the use of “aspirin” as a generic term, Sterling attached the name “Bayer” onto its products.

Sterling Drug company picnic in 1926 (Courtesy of the OCPL Archives)

Ultimately, in 1939, Weiss decided to align Sterling even closer to I.G. Farben—offering to manufacture I.G.’s products to send to Latin America.16

In December 1941, after Sterling was found in breach of US anti-trust laws for its contracts with I.G. Farben, both Weiss and Diebold were forced to resign.

Wheeling Tile closed in 1962 after declaring bankruptcy.

The Wheeling Corrugating Company began producing ornamental steel ceiling plates in 1989.

3 Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer, The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 50.

1.; “Sterling Products Co. | Sterling Drug,” Ohio County Public Library, accessed June 7, 2021, https://www.ohiocountylibrary.org/history/sterling-products-co.-sterling-drug/7140.