Mt. Wood
Mt. Wood Cemetery in Wheeling, W.Va., which occupies some of the highest ground in the city, was purchased by Wheeling’s Jewish community in 1849. oldest Jewish cemetery in West Virginia has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
According to historic accounts, the early Jewish settlers in Wheeling purchased the ground for the cemetery after a visiting rabbi died. They started a congregation, L’Shem Shomayim, from which Temple Shalom is descended.
Mt. Wood is the final resting place for some of the community’s leading families.
Among those buried there are Samuel Kraus, a veteran of the Mexican-American and Civil wars who saw action at Antietam and Gettysburg; Simon Horkheimer, one of the civic leaders who worked to temporarily bring the state capital back to Wheeling, where West Virginia was formally established, and L.S. Good, whose dry goods store evolved into a department store empire with locations across the East Coast. Good’s house in Wheeling also is on the National Register
The cemetery is actually part of a larger memorial park, chartered as “Mt. Woods” in 1848, which includes cemeteries for other faiths. The entire park was included in the designation.
The West Virginia Division of Culture and History notified Temple Shalom on Sept. 13 2014 of the designation.
Mt. Wood is not the only West Virginia Jewish site on the National Register. The Spring Hill Cemetery in Kanawha County, which includes B’nai Israel Cemetery and Lowenstein Family Cemetery, is also included.
