Enterprise Wheel & Car

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A welder at the Enterprise Wheel & Car Corp. on Park
Avenue in Westmoreland works on a huge steel hopper
to be installed in a coal cleaning tipple.

File photo | The Herald-Dispatch

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HUNTINGTON — For more than 40 years, Enterprise Wheel &
 Car Corp. was a busy place, equipped for the custom processing
of iron, steel and other metals for a variety of industrial uses.

Enterprise Wheel and; Car was established in 1924 when it located in a
cavernous factory building in the city’s Westmoreland neighborhood.
 The building had been built circa 1917 for the Kyle Smith Aircraft
Co. of Wheeling, which manufactured a two-seat biplane
aircraft. The Wheeling company became the West
Virginia Airplane Co. in 1919 and closed the
 Huntington factory about that time.

Enterprise Wheel & Car purchased the huge Park
Avenue building for the meager sum of $16,000 and
started manufacturing mine cars, which long remained
a major portion of its business. The company
typically employed between 40 and 50
workers although at peak production
 its workforce could grow
to more than 100.

The company remained in business through the Great Depression,
 World War II and the Korean Conflict before selling
to Black Diamond Industries in 1969.

The big building was vacant when the Coalfield Development
 Corp. acquired it in 2019. Today, Coalfield Development
is in the process of using a $7 million federal grant to
redevelop the polluted property into a new
 solar logistics and job training hub.

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Note:  This Article and picture appeared in the Herald-Dispatch Newspaper on Oct. 4, 2022..

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