WTAC-TV was a UHF TV station which was located in Flint, Michigan

Flint, Michigan

Flint is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and is located along the Flint River, northwest of Detroit. The U.S. Census Bureau reports the 2010 population to be placed at 102,434, making Flint the seventh largest city in Michigan. It is the county seat of Genesee County which lies in the...

. It operated on channel 16 and went on the air on Thanksgiving Day of 1953. It was owned by the Trendle-Campbell Broadcasting Company which was a partnership of George W. Trendle

George W. Trendle

George Washington Trendle was a Detroit lawyer and businessman, best known as the producer of the Lone Ranger radio and television programs along with The Green Hornet. He is entombed in Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery.-Movie theaters:...

 (creator of The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger is a fictional masked Texas Ranger who, with his Native American companion Tonto, fights injustice in the American Old West. The character has become an enduring icon of American culture....

) and H. Allen Campbell which also owned WTAC(AM) which is now WSNL

WSNL

WSNL is a radio station broadcasting a religious format. Licensed to Flint, Michigan, it first began broadcasting in 1946.The original call letters were WFLM, but the station was purchased in December of 1946 by George W. Trendle and H. Allen Campbell, who changed the call letters to WTCB and made...

 in Flint. It was affiliated with ABC-TV

American Broadcasting Company

The American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...

 and DuMont

DuMont Television Network

The DuMont Television Network, also known as the DuMont Network, DuMont, Du Mont, or Dumont was one of the world's pioneer commercial television networks, rivalling NBC for the distinction of being first overall. It began operation in the United States in 1946. It was owned by DuMont...

. The TV station went out of business less than a year later, in the middle of ABC's coverage of the Army-McCarthy hearings, because too few TVs at the time were equipped to receive UHF channels. The broadcast tower was destroyed in a 1956 tornado. The WTAC-TV studios became the WJRT-TV

WJRT-TV

WJRT-TV, channel 12, is the ABC-affiliated station for the Flint/Tri-Cities television market, owned by SJL Broadcasting. Its studios are located in Flint, Michigan, with offices and a second newsroom for the Tri-Cities located in Saginaw...

 studios in 1958.

Today, the signal space for channel 16 is home to WSMH

WSMH

WSMH is the Fox-affiliated television station for the Flint/Tri-Cities market that is licensed to Flint. It broadcasts a high definition digital signal on UHF channel 16 from a 245 kilowatt, high transmitter on Aman Rd near St. Charles, Michigan...

's digital signal, which remains on channel 16 after that station shut down its analog signal May 21, 2009, and following the nationwide analog television shutdown

DTV transition in the United States

The DTV transition in the United States was the switchover from analog to exclusively digital broadcasting of free over-the-air television programming...

that took place June 12, 2009.