A century ago, a stretch of riverfront in Kenova, West Virginia was home to a revolving door of industry, a steel company that collapsed within two years, a mine car manufacturer born from merger, and a spark plug maker turned insulator giant that survived two bankruptcies and a devastating fire. Explore the tangled, layered history of this small-town industrial site.
These are some of the earliest exploring photos I’ve taken, dating back to 2005, from a site down in Kenova, West Virginia. I’d long wondered what this sprawling riverfront property once was. Turns out its history runs through steel, mine cars, electrical insulators, and finally coal transshipment, each industry rising from the wreckage of the one before it.
It started in 1909 as Independent Steel Company, backed by $2 million in capital. Undercapitalized from the start, it collapsed into receivership by 1911, and a federal judge ordered it shut down.
In 1915, the Kenova Mine Car Company took over the 20-acre site, and by 1917 it had merged with an Ohio pit car manufacturer to form the Fulton Kenova Mine Car Company, producing mine cars for the coal industry. After a 1927 legal shakeup, the Champion Switch Plant Company moved in from Buffalo.
Meanwhile, a separate piece of the old steel plant went to the Jeffery-Dewitt Insulator Company. Its roots trace to 1908, when two brothers and a brother-in-law founded a spark plug company in New Jersey. Champion Spark Plug bought them out in 1915, then built a dedicated insulator plant here in 1916. Flooding delayed production until 1920 — the same year their key patent finally came through.
Jeffery-Dewitt went bankrupt in 1921, reorganized, then went bankrupt again in 1940. McGraw Electric’s Line Material division ran it afterward, until fire destroyed the plant in 1952.
Later, the Kenova Terminal Company used the property to off-load coal from railcars onto barges, until newer facilities opened in Ceredo.
Today, only a single warehouse remains.
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This also used to be the location of Scandia Glass until it closed in the early 1980’s