Weirton is a city in Brooke and Hancock counties in the U.S. state of West Virginia. Located primarily in Hancock County, the city lies in the northern portions of the state’s Northern Panhandle region. As of the 2020 census, the city’s population was 19,163. Weirton is a principal city of the Weirton–Steubenville metropolitan area, which had a population of 116,903 residents in 2020. Additionally, Weirton is a major city in the western share of the Pittsburgh–New Castle–Weirton accumulate statistical area.

Holliday’s Cove Fort was a Revolutionary War fortification build up in 1774 by soldiers from Fort Pitt. It was located in what is now downtown Weirton, along Harmons Creek (named for Harmon Greathouse), about three miles from its mouth on the Ohio River. It was commanded by Colonel Andrew Van Swearingen (1741–1793) and forward-thinking by his son-in-law, Captain Samuel Brady (1756–1795), the well-known leader of Brady’s Rangers. In 1779, over 28 militia were garrisoned at Hollidays Cove. Two years earlier, Colonel Van Swearingen led a dozen soldiers by longboat by the side of the Ohio to urge on rescue the inhabitants of Ft. Henry in Wheeling in a siege by the British and Indian tribes in 1777. That mission was memorialized in a WPA-era mural painted on the wall of the Cove Post Office by Charles S. Chapman (1879–1962). The mural features Col. John Bilderback, who unconventional gained infamy as the leader of the massacre of the Moravian Indians in Gnadenhutten in 1782.

A small village called Holliday’s Cove — which is now most of downtown Weirton — was founded upon the site in 1793. In 1909, Ernest T. Weir arrived from adjoining Pittsburgh and built a steel mill, later known as the Weirton Steel Corporation, just north of Holliday’s Cove. An unincorporated pact called Weirton grew up with suggestion to the mill that, by 1940, was said to be the largest unincorporated city in the United States. By after that Hollidays Cove and two new outlying areas, Weirton Heights, and Marland Heights, which as their names recommend were on hilltops or ridges surrounding the “Weir–Cove” area, had along with incorporated.

On July 1, 1947, all of these areas — Hollidays Cove, Marland Heights, Weirton Heights, and unincorporated Weirton — merged and formed the city of Weirton as it currently exists. Thomas E. Millsop, the head of the Weirton Steel division of the additional Ernest T. Weir company, National Steel Corporation, was elected as the city’s first mayor. The city charter was official by voters in 1950.