Main+St+-+1600

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1600 Main - Baer Grocer Co.
Built ~1894. Part of the Wheeling Warehouse Historic District. //The Baer's Sons Grocery Company was established ca. 1894. The family had been in the wholesale grocery business since 1866 supplying products to wholesale grocers, coffee roasters, and spice millers. The large opening on the first floor of the northwest elevation allowed the trains to pull into the building facilitating loading and unloading.// Quoted from Historic Register [|documentation]. In 2016, the Woda Group purchased building and started transition to 70 plus apartments. Building uses large timber columns and trusses - it's a wonder it hasn't burned down over last 100 years. Wood columns will be preserved as is - a 100 year old patina. Joanne Sullivan's [|photos] from Friends of Wheeling tour in April 2016.

By 1920 this building was called the Union Warehouse. From //Wheeling and Vicinity//, 1920. 2014 image from Flatiron Building Transition view from warehouse to bridge. Image from Ohio County Public Library website, forwarded by Jeanne Fenstein. From an article about the Main Street Bridge. Iimage from //Souvenir History of Wheeling//: Philadelphia: Pictorial Publishing, 1906, OCPL Archives.



Main Street Bridge
Built 1891-2. The arch spans 159 ft. Stone cut at a stone yard at 29th and Eoff. A massive wooden arch was constructed first as a base to construct the permanent stone arch, and the wooden one was removed when the bridge was completed. The superintendent of construction, Dominick Carey, of the contracting firm of Paige, Carey & Co, New York, was [|drowned] during an accident when heavy stones were being moved. Historical significance: the longest single-span stone bridge in the US (Pavilack and Fluty, 1990). Newspaper [|article] describing building.