Wheeling, West Virginia, and the 'Place of the Head'

Wheeling, West Virginia, most likely got its name from a Delaware word about a head, though an 1839 directory gave the credit to a priest named Wheelan. Even the head version comes in more than one form, so it’s worth seeing what each old source actually says about the name of the city that became West Virginia’s first capital.

The Delaware word

John Heckewelder put together a list of place names left by the people his title calls the “Lenni Lennape or Delaware Indians,” with their meanings, and the Moravian Historical Society published it in 1872. His entry is for Wheeling Creek, which runs into the Ohio at the city. He says the name was “corrupted from Wihling,” meaning “where the head is, or the place of the head.”

Henry Gannett’s 1905 government bulletin on American place names gives the city two versions. One is “weal-ink, meaning ‘place of a human head.’” The other, from what Gannett calls “another authority,” is “whilink, ‘at the head of the river.’” So you’ve already got three spellings, and two different kinds of head: a human one, or the head of a river.

A head on a pole

The grim version comes with a story attached. Henry Howe’s 1845 Historical Collections of Virginia passes along an account from John Brittle, who had been taken prisoner by the Delawares, lived with them five years, and learned their language. As Brittle told it, Delaware warriors killed some white settlers at the mouth of Wheeling Creek, put one man’s head on a pole facing the river, and “called the spot Weeling.” Brittle also said that a Delaware hunter, asked where he’d hit a deer or a bear, would answer “weeling” if the shot was in the head.

The 1872 list carries a similar note on Wheeling Creek: the Indians said that along the creek they had beheaded a prisoner and put his head on a stake. Gannett gives the same reason for “place of a human head.” None of these accounts names the victim or gives a year, so treat the pole as a tradition that came with the word, not as a recorded event.

The priest named Wheelan

Howe also prints the outlier, from Bowen’s Directory of Wheeling for 1839. “A very intelligent merchant of this city” said a Catholic priest from Europe named “Wheelan” camped at the mouth of the creek on a mission trip, “left a name behind him,” and the town’s founders later “changed its orthography,” which is a fancy way of saying they spelled it differently. The directory doesn’t name the merchant or give a date.

Which one holds up

Virgil A. Lewis weighed the choices in 1889. He wrote that “a diversity of opinion has existed” and that “several theories have been advanced,” then picked the Brittle account from Howe as “the most probable.” The Delaware word has the more solid backing: a man who learned the language, a compiler of Delaware place names, and Gannett all point to a word about a head. The Wheelan story rests on one unnamed merchant. If you only remember one thing, make it this: the word is better supported than any single story about why it was used.

Sources & further reading

• John Heckewelder, Names Which the Lenni Lennape or Delaware Indians Gave to Rivers, Streams and Localities (Moravian Historical Society, 1872), p. 47. Wheeling Creek, “corrupted from Wihling,” “where the head is, or the place of the head,” and the note about the prisoner.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 323. “Weal-ink,” “place of a human head,” and the second reading, “whilink, ‘at the head of the river.’”
• Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Virginia (1845), p. 408. John Brittle’s account via John White, and the Wheelan story from Bowen’s 1839 directory.
• Virgil A. Lewis, History of West Virginia (1889), pp. 469-470, 516-517. Wheeling as the state’s first capital, and Lewis’s choice of the Brittle account as “the most probable.”
• GNIS feature 1548994 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record notes the site of Fort Fincastle in 1774, later called Fort Henry for Patrick Henry.