Ohio County, West Virginia Biography of William S. STENGER This biography was submitted by Kerry Armour, E-mail address: This file may be freely copied by individuals and non-profit organizations for their private use. All other rights reserved. Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other means requires the written approval of the file's author. This file is part of the WVGenWeb Archives. If you arrived here inside a frame or from a link from somewhere else, our front door is at http://www.usgwarchives.net/wv/wvfiles.htm 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.