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WHEELING, W.Va. – Jeanne Finstein, Ed.D., president of Friends of Wheeling, will present “The Blue and Gray of Greenwood: Civil War Veterans Interred in Greenwood Cemetery” at West Virginia Independence Hall (WVIH) in Wheeling on Saturday, April 27 at 1 p.m. The program is free and open to the public. Finstein has located more than 200 Civil War veterans in Greenwood Cemetery and has selected a few to present to visitors at WVIH. Among those to be featured are a Congressional Medal of Honor winner; a Confederate navy man who later was responsible for the building of Wheeling’s Main Street bridge; a Union surgeon who had supervised the drilling of the first oil well in what is now West Virginia; a German immigrant who witnessed the hanging of abolitionist John Brown; a Confederate cavalryman who became one of Wheeling’s most well-known defense attorneys; the founder of Wheeling’s well-known Union artillery unit; and a Confederate who claimed to have fired the second shot at Fort Sumter. Two women also are included in the presentation – a Civil War nurse and later active suffragette, and the leader of the Union Ladies of LaBelle. Along with her position with Friends of Wheeling, Finstein serves as treasurer of the Ohio Valley Civil War Roundtable and the Wheeling Area Genealogical Society. She also is president of Polyhedron Learning Media, Inc., a Wheeling-based company that develops educational software. Finstein spent many years as a classroom teacher and later served as acting president of the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future. Her interest in Civil War-era Wheeling led her to conduct research on the men and women who had a part in the war. For more information about WVIH, contact Debbie Jones, site manager, at (304) 238-1300 or Deborah.J.Jones@wv.gov. West Virginia Independence Hall has been on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) since 1970. It was originally built as a federal custom house in 1859, served as the home of the pro-Union state conventions of Virginia during the spring and summer of 1861 and as the capitol of loyal Virginia from June 1861 to June 1863. It also was the site of the first constitutional convention for West Virginia. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1988, the museum is maintained and operated by the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, with the cooperation and assistance of the West Virginia Independence Hall Foundation. The museum is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, with the exception of major holidays. The museum is located on the corner of 16th and Market Streets in Wheeling. -30- |
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