Saint Joseph Cathedral: Wheeling's Florentine Dome
West Virginia
In eighteen twenty-two, a missionary priest named Edward Fenwick built a small log church for the German and Irish Catholic immigrants who had come to work the Ohio River trade in Wheeling, a then-thriving Virginia town at the end of the National Road. That log church was the beginning of what now rises above the city as the Cathedral of Saint Joseph, one of the most architecturally ambitious buildings in West Virginia.
The Catholic presence in Wheeling grew with the city. In eighteen fifty, Pope Pius the Ninth designated Wheeling as the seat of a new diocese, and the congregation's building became a cathedral. The parish name was changed to Saint Joseph in eighteen seventy-two, reflecting both the devotion spreading through American Catholic communities and the spiritual resonance of a patron of workers in a city built on glass, steel, and coal.
A fire badly damaged the old cathedral in nineteen twenty-three. Rather than repair what had been lost, Bishop John Joseph Swint commissioned something entirely new. Architect Edward J. Weber drew on Italian Romanesque models, taking inspiration from San Pietro in Toscanella and the cathedral in Prato near Florence. The result, completed in nineteen twenty-six, is a building that feels transplanted from northern Italy to the banks of the Ohio.
The most striking feature is the dome. Rising one hundred forty-eight feet above the city, it was modeled on Brunelleschi's famous dome for the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. In a river city better known for industry than for architecture, the dome's presence is startling. Intricate mosaics, stained glass windows, and a carved marble altar complete an interior that took decades to reach its current state.
Wheeling itself had been the capital of the Restored Government of Virginia during the Civil War, the loyal government that refused to leave the Union, and eventually became the first capital of West Virginia in eighteen sixty-three. The cathedral has watched over that history from its hilltop ever since.
