Get an ADT-Monitored Home Security System in Weirton, West Virginia

Weirton is a city in Brooke and Hancock counties in the U.S. state of West Virginia. Located primarily in Hancock County, the city lies in the northern portions of the state’s Northern Panhandle region. As of the 2020 census, the city’s population was 19,163. Weirton is a principal city of the Weirton–Steubenville metropolitan area, which had a population of 116,903 residents in 2020. Additionally, Weirton is a major city in the western share of the Pittsburgh–New Castle–Weirton amassed statistical area.

Holliday’s Cove Fort was a Revolutionary War fortification build up in 1774 by soldiers from Fort Pitt. It was located in what is now downtown Weirton, along Harmons Creek (named for Harmon Greathouse), about three miles from its mouth upon the Ohio River. It was commanded by Colonel Andrew Van Swearingen (1741–1793) and forward-thinking by his son-in-law, Captain Samuel Brady (1756–1795), the well-known leader of Brady’s Rangers. In 1779, over 28 militia were garrisoned at Hollidays Cove. Two years earlier, Colonel Van Swearingen led a dozen soldiers by longboat the length of the Ohio to support rescue the inhabitants of Ft. Henry in Wheeling in a siege by the British and Indian tribes in 1777. That mission was memorialized in a WPA-era mural painted upon the wall of the Cove Post Office by Charles S. Chapman (1879–1962). The mural features Col. John Bilderback, who highly developed gained infamy as the leader of the massacre of the Moravian Indians in Gnadenhutten in 1782.

A small village called Holliday’s Cove — which is now most of downtown Weirton — was founded on the site in 1793. In 1909, Ernest T. Weir arrived from neighboring Pittsburgh and built a steel mill, later known as the Weirton Steel Corporation, just north of Holliday’s Cove. An unincorporated pact called Weirton grew up on the order of the mill that, by 1940, was said to be the largest unincorporated city in the United States. By subsequently Hollidays Cove and two further outlying areas, Weirton Heights, and Marland Heights, which as their names recommend were on hilltops or ridges surrounding the “Weir–Cove” area, had in addition to incorporated.