Ohio County, West Virginia      Biography of William S. STENGER

This biography was submitted by Kerry Armour,
E-mail address:  <cmac4330@chesapeake.net>

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The History of West Virginia, Old and New
Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc.
Chicago and New York, Volume II
pg.66 & 67

WILLIAM S. STENGER. One of the, most successful concerns in West
Virginia handling motor trucks and equipment is the Stenger Motor
Company of Wheeling, a business founded and built up with steadily
increasing prosperity by William S. Stenger, a young business man
of great energy who has had the faculty of doing well anything he
undertook. He is a member of a very well known family in the
Wheeling District.

He was born in Ohio County, West Virginia, May 20 1885. His grandfather,
John Stenger, was born in 1837 in Pennsylvania and soon after the Civil
war moved to the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia and spent the rest
of his life as a farmer in Ohio and Brooke counties. He died at Beech
Bottom in Brooke County in 1897. His son, John J. Stenger, was born in
Belmont County, Ohio, in February 1862, spent his early life there,
married in Wheeling, and for twenty-five years was employed in the sheet
department of iron and steel rolling mills. Since 1907 he has been
busied with his farm at Short Creek, West Virginia. He has grown a
large acreage in wheat and also has a peach orchard of twenty acres.
John J. Stenger is a Catholic, a democrat, and member of Carroll
Council No. 504, Knights of Columbus, Wheeling. He married Jane Myles,
who was born at Wheeling in August, 1862. Of their children the oldest
is Catherine, wife of Bernard Baker, a stationary engineer living at
Warwood, Wheeling. The second in age is William S. John J., Jr.,
is associated with the Stenger Motor company. Vincent J. went overseas
with the One Hundred and Eighteenth Engineers and died in England in
1918, the age of twenty-eight. Herbert M. and Earl are with their
father on the farm. Raymond E. is a student in St. Charles College
at Baltimore.

William S. Stenger acquired his early education in the public schools
of Wheeling, graduated from the Cathedral High School in 1904, and
during the next five years be managed his father's retail dairy in
Wheeling. From 1909 to 1916 he farmed on his own account in Ohio
County, and in the latter year he opened at Wheeling a business known
as the Sandow Motor Sales Company. In the summer of 1921 changed the
name to the Stenger Motor Company, of which he is sole properietor.
His garage, salesrooms and offices are at the corner of Eleventh and
Water streets. The Stenger Motor Company is the local distributing
agency for the Gramm-Bernstein Motor Trucks, Pilot cars, sells tires
and standard parts for motor trucks, and Mr. Stenger has developed a
business that is recognized as an indispensable service to all truck
owners at Wheeling.

Mr. Stenger is a republican, a member of the Catholic Church and Carroll
Council No. 504, Knights of Columbus. His home is at 118 Twenty-first
Street in Norwood. November 24, 1909, at Wheeling, he married Miss Sadie
E. Smith, daughter of John E. and Mary Catherine (Raab) Smith, of Short
Creek, where her mother lives. Her father was a farmer and died at Short
Creek. Mrs. Stenger completed her education in the West Liberty Normal
School. To their marriage have been born six children: Ralph, born in
September, 1910; Sarah, January 13, 1912; Gertrude, in May, 1913; Ruth,
in November, 1914; Blanche, in August, 1917; and Angela, in September,
1919.