bdmetronews Desk ॥ When Donald Trump talked about running to represent the “forgotten men and women” that the American dream had left behind, he could very well have been talking about the residents of this tiny village at the foothills of the Appalachians, in the heart of the Ohio River Valley.
A little less than 40 years ago, a young Robert De Niro piloted a gleaming white Cadillac up Commercial Street here, filming a pivotal scene in the Vietnam War epic “The Deer Hunter.” But today, the street stands bleak and empty. Many of its buildings are boarded up and condemned, dark against the rusting iron husk of the vacant steel mill that rises tall above town like a haunted tombstone for the village’s better days.
Thousands of people used to walk down the hill toward the river to jobs at the former Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel mill before it closed permanently eight years ago after a series of ownership changes. The restaurants and shops that depended on the workers soon went away too — leaving just a handful of businesses, almost all of them bars, patronized by residents who struggle to keep their lives afloat in a town that sometimes doesn’t have enough money to keep the streetlights lit.
Almost everybody here in this town of 3,300 people is a registered Democrat, a party affiliation that dates back to their parents and their parents’ parents. But during the past 20 years, as the mining and steel industries here have collapsed, the die-hard Democrats have become less die-hard, disillusioned by a party they feel has left the working class behind.
