Oglebay Institute of Art

Wheeling, West Virginia
I love to stub my toes on my own snobbery. Before I discovered the Oglebay Institute of Art, I had an image of Wheeling as a kind of Pittsburgh with hillbillies. How benighted I was. And it all developed because I stopped for lunch at the Wheeling Inn after a pothole-filled trip up along the Ohio River from Marietta.

The motel sits perkily between the oldest suspension bridge in America and the newest interstate span. What could a bridge fancier do but slow down and look around? The Oglebay is another regrooved stately house. Its current exhibition was an exchange show between two towns at the extremities of the state. Not ultimate stuff, but authentic and shareable.

The gallery shop was another thing. Crafts are a big little business in West Virginia, and the buyer here was almost as good as the supremely talented one at the West Virginia Cultural Center at Charleston. (If I didn't love touting the unknown I'd be telling you about Charleston's brand-new building, first-class museology. But this is Wheeling's day.)

A mime troupe bewitched the Sunday strollers with foofaraw from the front steps of the Oglebay. A little engine that tries to toot as hard as that deserves a break. And the Oglebay's got its break--it discovered a steeltown Grandma Moses, one Patrick Sullivan, with a tiny oeuvre but an absolutely idiosyncratic one. Write for the catalogue. It's in the mainstream of the American quirky.

As if I weren't abashed enough by my now-squashed-down metro elitism, I had to face further amenities on that goshawful wonderful Sunday in Wheeling. Over a few hills and down a dale or two in a lush meadowland called Oglebay Park, the annual opera festival was in full aria. At first I thought I was hallucinating as I ran into droves of baritones humming baroquely to themselves.

Just warming up, I was told curtly. This day led to Hazard's First Law of Tourism: If Wheeling is that interesting, don't ever tell me you live in a dull town.

Remember Thoreau's proud boast that he had traveled much in Concord, population 1,000.

--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981