page_title: Huntington, West Virginia
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Huntington, West Virginia / History
caption_attribution_description: Collis P. Huntington; Gelatin silver print
context_page_description: Huntington is a city in Cabell and Wayne Counties in the U.S. state of West Virginia. It is the county seat of Cabell County, and largest city in the Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH Metropolitan Statistical Area, sometimes referred to as the Tri-State Area. A historic and bustling city of commerce and heavy industry, Huntington has benefited from its location on the Ohio River at the mouth of the Guyandotte River. It is home to the Port of Huntington Tri-State, the second-busiest inland port in the United States.
  Surrounded by extensive natural resources, the industrial sector is based in coal, oil, chemicals and steel, all of which support Huntington's diversified economy. The city is a vital rail-to-river transfer point for the marine transportation industry. Also, it is considered a scenic locale in the western foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. This location was selected by Collis Potter Huntington as ideal for the western terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, the predecessor of what would become CSX Transportation which still operates CSX Transportation-Huntington Division in the city to date.
context_section_description: The first permanent settlement in modern-day Huntington was founded in 1775 as "Holderby's Landing." The modern City of Huntington was founded by Collis P. Huntington and Delos W. Emmons as the western terminus for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) on a tract of land west of the mouth of the Guyandotte River, between the Ohio River and Twelve Pole Creek. Collis P. Huntington was one of the "Big Four" of western railroading who built the Central Pacific Railroad as part of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad (along with Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker).
  Huntington was created as a hub for the C&O, which, once completed in 1873, fulfilled a long-held dream of the Virginias to have a rail link from the James River at Richmond, Virginia to the Ohio River Valley. The new railroad facilities adjacent to the Ohio River resulted in expansion of the former small town of Guyandotte into part of a large new city called Huntington. The C&O Railroad expanded east to Newport News (and coal piers), and west to eventually reach Cincinnati and Chicago in later years. After merging with several other railroads, C&O is now known as CSX Transportation.
  The city was incorporated in 1871 just west of the earlier city of Guyandotte. Guyandotte, which became a neighborhood of Huntington in 1891, was founded in 1799 on land that was originally part of the 28,628-acre (115.85 km²) French and Indian War veteran's Savage Grant. Meriwether Lewis passed the Guyandotte and Big Sandy River peninsula on or about September 20, 1803, on his way down the Ohio River before meeting up with William Clark in Clarksville, Ind.
  Huntington was the second American city to feature electric streetcars in the early years (after San Francisco), until they were gradually replaced with gasoline-powered buses. Some of the old trolley tracks can still be seen. Camden Park, which at 110 years old is one of the world's oldest amusement parks, was built in 1903 to encourage ridership on the trolleys (then owned by the Camden Interstate Railway Company).
  Huntington's "boom" period occurred from the founding in 1871 until the Great Flood of 1937, which claimed 5 lives, caused millions of dollars in damage, left tens of thousands homeless, and led to the creation of Huntington's floodwalls in 1938.
  Of the 40,000 people living in the flooded areas of Huntington, 25,000 were made refugees as fresh water and fuel was scarce. 11,000 people applied for Red Cross aid during the flood and the relief period.
  World War II brought another economic boom, but that was short-lived and ended along with the war in the 1940s. Huntington's population began to drop after 1950 because of urban sprawl and the decline of the steel and manufacturing industries. In the 1970s, federal urban renewal programs destroyed several parts of downtown. The industrial base continued to expand through the 1970s, but beginning in the early 1980s the steel and manufacturing industry in the region imploded, with massive layoffs and mill and plant closures.
  A shift to the city's economic base began in the late 1980s to focus more on education, tourism, and services, based mainly on healthcare/medicine and biotechnology. Although Huntington successfully shifted the focus of its economy, the population has never rebounded to its industrial-era highs. While 86,353 people lived in the city proper in 1950, a combination of suburbanization and economic turbulence caused a sharp decrease in population to just 51,475 in 2000.
caption: Collis P. Huntington, founder of the City of Huntington.
exif: {"Image Software": "Picasa 3.0", "Image ExifOffset": "50", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "400", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "510", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "150", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "d87cda4255f0c89353f58ee8aec51837"}