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Collis Potter Huntington (October 22, 1821 – August 13, 1900)[2] was one of the Big Four of western railroading. (along with Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker) who invested in Theodore Judah's idea to build the Central Pacific Railroad as part of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. Huntington then helped lead and develop other major interstate lines such as the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (C&O), which he was recruited to help complete. The C&O, completed in 1873, fulfilled a long-held dream of Virginians of a rail link from the James River at Richmond to the Ohio River Valley. The new railroad facilities adjacent to the river there resulted in expansion of the former small town of Guyandotte, West Virginia into part of a new city which was named Huntington in his honor.
Next, turning attention to the eastern end of the line at Richmond, he was responsible for the C&O's Peninsula Extension in 1881–82 which opened a pathway for West Virginia bituminous coal to reach new coal piers on the harbor of Hampton Roads for export shipping. He also is credited with the development of Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, as well as the incorporation of Newport News, Virginia as a new independent city. After his death, both his nephew Henry E. Huntington and his stepson Archer M. Huntington continued his work at Newport News, and all three are considered founding fathers in the community, with local features named in honor of each.
Much of the railroad and industrial development Collis P. Huntington envisioned and led are still important activities in the early 21st century. The Southern Pacific is now part of the Union Pacific Railroad, and the C&O became part of CSX Transportation, each major U.S. railroad systems. West Virginia coal still rides the rails to be loaded aboard colliers at Hampton Roads, where nearby, Huntington Ingalls Industries operates the massive shipyard.
Huntington, from his base in Washington, was a lobbyist for the Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific in the 1870s and 1880s. The Big Four had built a powerful political machine, that he had a large role in running. He was generous in providing bribes to politicians and Congressmen. Revelation of his misdeeds in 1883 made him one of the most hated railroad men in the country.
Huntington defended himself:
The motives back of my actions have been honest ones and results have redounded far more to the benefit of California than they have to my own.[3]
Next, turning attention to the eastern end of the line at Richmond, he was responsible for the C&O's Peninsula Extension in 1881–82 which opened a pathway for West Virginia bituminous coal to reach new coal piers on the harbor of Hampton Roads for export shipping. He also is credited with the development of Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, as well as the incorporation of Newport News, Virginia as a new independent city. After his death, both his nephew Henry E. Huntington and his stepson Archer M. Huntington continued his work at Newport News, and all three are considered founding fathers in the community, with local features named in honor of each.
Much of the railroad and industrial development Collis P. Huntington envisioned and led are still important activities in the early 21st century. The Southern Pacific is now part of the Union Pacific Railroad, and the C&O became part of CSX Transportation, each major U.S. railroad systems. West Virginia coal still rides the rails to be loaded aboard colliers at Hampton Roads, where nearby, Huntington Ingalls Industries operates the massive shipyard.
Huntington, from his base in Washington, was a lobbyist for the Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific in the 1870s and 1880s. The Big Four had built a powerful political machine, that he had a large role in running. He was generous in providing bribes to politicians and Congressmen. Revelation of his misdeeds in 1883 made him one of the most hated railroad men in the country.
Huntington defended himself:
The motives back of my actions have been honest ones and results have redounded far more to the benefit of California than they have to my own.[3]
Collis Potter Huntington - Wikipedia
Posted from en.wikipedia.org
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Four Capitalists Who Created California and Their Epic Drive for Money
"The Big Four" was the name popularly given to the famous and influential businessmen, philanthropists and railroad tycoons who built the Central Pacific Rai...
Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that October 22 is the anniversary of the birth relatively poor but industrious son of a farmer in Poverty Hollow, Connecticut
Collis Potter Huntington that became a Transcontinental Railroad magnate of the 19th century who "invested in Theodore Judah's idea to build the Central Pacific Railroad as part of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. Huntington then helped lead and develop other major interstate lines such as the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (C&O), which he was recruited to help complete in 1873.
Rest in peace Collis Potter Huntington
Image:
1. Detail from Puck magazine, “It costs money to fix things” –C.P. Huntington – “As it is plain that most of our Congressmen are for sale, they might as well display their prices prominently,” January, 1884 – Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
2. Poverty Hollow School, Harwinton, Connecticut – Connecticut State Library, Mills Photograph Collection of Connecticut, 1895-1955 (PG 180)
3. Collis Potter Huntington, 1821-1900 – Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Background from connecticuthistory.org/collis-p-huntington-the-boy-from-poverty-hollow/
"Collis P. Huntington: The Boy from Poverty Hollow By Nancy Finlay
South of Route 4 in Harwinton, Connecticut, where a small stream called Huntington Brook flows into Leadmine Brook, is an area once known as Poverty Hollow. Here, in the early years of the 19th century, William H. Huntington had a 30-acre farm, and he lived with his wife Elizabeth Vincent Huntington and their nine children (three sons and six daughters). The sixth child, born on October 22, 1821, they christened Collis Potter Huntington.
Growing Up in Harwinton
Growing up, times were hard and the Huntington’s farm did not prosper. Neither did a fulling mill and a shingle mill which Huntington’s father operated. The children had to help out on the farm and in the mills, and their schooling, in the local one-room schoolhouse, became irregular. Collis did well in arithmetic, history, and geography, but not in spelling or grammar. He was a big boy and an unruly student, who, when his teacher tried to strike him with a ruler as a punishment, turned on the teacher and fought back.
Another teacher remembered Collis as “very poorly clothed, and not well cared for.” The Huntingtons became so poor and destitute that in 1834 the town selectmen removed Collis and his older brother from the family home and placed them with local farmers. Collis worked for Orson Barber for a year, earning seven dollars a month, then went to work for another neighbor, Phineas Noble, who ran a small store. Part of the time the boy worked as a peddler, selling merchandise from door to door in northwestern Connecticut. Later, still in his teens, he branched out on his own, selling clocks and “Yankee notions” in the South.
Meanwhile, Collis’s older brother Solon left Connecticut and established a store in Oneonta, New York. In 1844, Collis joined him, investing his surprisingly substantial savings in the business, which then became S. & C. P. Huntington. The same year, on September 18, Collis married a distant cousin, Elizabeth Stoddard, of Cornwall, Connecticut. (The marriage lasted until Elizabeth’s death in 1883.)
Collis Huntington and the Central Pacific Railroad
S. & C. P. Huntington quickly became the most successful store in Otsego County. Solon and Collis were both prosperous and respected, but Collis was not content. Like many other young Americans in 1848–1849, he headed west for California upon learning of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. Unlike most of the others, however, who headed straight for the gold fields, Collis opened a store in Sacramento selling mining equipment. While most of the miners wound up broke, Collis Huntington amassed a small fortune. This became the basis for a very large fortune, when, in the 1860s, Huntington became involved in building the Central Pacific Railroad—the line which ran east from California to meet up with Union Pacific, creating the first transcontinental railroad. Huntington’s empire eventually went on to include the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (though many criticized it as built on the typically disingenuous practices of a “robber baron,” such as bribing politicians and withholding dividend payments from minority stockholders).
Despite his success, Huntington never not forget his Connecticut origins. In 1885, he proposed building a chapel behind the Congregational Church in Harwinton in memory of his mother. The little Gothic chapel, with lovely stained glass windows, reached completion in 1887. At its dedication, Huntington, then 66 years old, recalled how his mother, “one of the best women that ever lived,” often “worked into the small hours of the night that her children might be comfortably clothed on the morrow.” He referred bitterly to his forced removal from the family in 1834, saying that “the Harwinton selectmen did not consult Solon or myself or our parents about taking us away from our home . . . We were rudely moved and had to like it.” Nevertheless, he concluded that “as often as I have returned to these my native hills have I been made glad that this was the place where I was born, and that I was born poor, for I think that was the reason, at least in part, of such success in life as I have been able to achieve.” His was the classic success story—a poor boy who grew up to be one of the most powerful and important men in America.
Collis Huntington died on August 13, 1900, at his Great Camp in the Adirondacks. He received a burial in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City. The chapel that he gave in memory of his mother fell into disrepair and was torn down in 1960. At about the same time, the Army Corps of Engineers acquired Poverty Hollow for a flood control project. Huntington’s birthplace had long since been torn down; the remaining houses and other buildings were demolished or moved from the area too and the valley eventually reverted back to forest.
Nancy Finlay grew up in Manchester, Connecticut. She has a BA from Smith College and an MFA and PhD from Princeton University. From 1998 to 2015, she was Curator of Graphics at the Connecticut Historical Society.
WEBSITES
“American Experience: Transcontinental Railroad - Biography: Collis P. Huntington.” PBS.org, 2016. “Harwinton’s History: Collis Potter Huntington.” Harwinton Historical Society, 2016.
PLACES
“Harwinton Historical Society,” 2012.
BOOKS
Harrison, Mitchell C., ed. “Collis Potter Huntington.” In Prominent and Progressive Americans; an Encyclopædia of Contemporaneous Biography, Vol. 1. New York, NY: New York Tribune, 1902.
Evans, Cerinda W. Collis Potter Huntington. Newport News, VA: Mariners’ Museum, 1954.
Lavender, David. The Great Persuader. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1970.
Four Capitalists Who Created California and Their Epic Drive for Money
""The Big Four" was the name popularly given to the famous and influential businessmen, philanthropists and railroad tycoons who built the Central Pacific Railroad, (C.P.R.R.), which formed the western portion through the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains of the First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, built from the mid-continent at the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean during the middle and late 1860s. Composed of Leland Stanford, (1824–1893), Collis Potter Huntington, (1821–1900), Mark Hopkins, (1813–1878), and Charles Crocker, (1822–1888), the four themselves however, personally preferred to be known as "The Associates."
Membership:
Leland Stanford, (1824–1893), – C.P.R.R. President, Stanford University founder.
Collis Potter Huntington, (1821–1900), – C.P.R.R. Vice President, for which the city of Huntington, West Virginia was named. He is also the uncle of Henry E. Huntington, (1850–1927), founder of the famous Huntington Library with its art galleries and gardens in San Marino, California.
Mark Hopkins, (1813–1878), – C.P.R.R. Treasurer
Charles Crocker, (1822–1888), – Construction Supervisor, President of Charles Crocker & Co., a C.P.R.R. subsidiary, later founder of the larger, more extensive Southern Pacific Railroad, another transcontinental link to the east, built later in 1883.
Collectively, the four philanthropically also established the Sacramento Library Association for the state capital in Sacramento, California in 1857, which later established the present Sacramento Public Library.[3]
David Hewes, an enterprising businessman, was called the "maker of San Francisco" for his work in clearing land for development. He was invited to be a part of the "Big Four" but declined due to the financial risks. Over his lifetime he gained and lost several fortunes.[4]
In their time, the four men were sometimes referred to as nabobs or "nobs," a reference to their wealth and influence. When the four built mansions in the same neighborhood of San Francisco, the area quickly became known as Nob Hill, a name it carries today."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIZjftSRzm0
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Orlando Illi Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown CMSgt (Join to see) MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSG David Andrews Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Charles H. Hawes SGT Mark Halmrast CPT Gabe SnellLTC Greg Henning SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL
Collis Potter Huntington that became a Transcontinental Railroad magnate of the 19th century who "invested in Theodore Judah's idea to build the Central Pacific Railroad as part of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad. Huntington then helped lead and develop other major interstate lines such as the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway (C&O), which he was recruited to help complete in 1873.
Rest in peace Collis Potter Huntington
Image:
1. Detail from Puck magazine, “It costs money to fix things” –C.P. Huntington – “As it is plain that most of our Congressmen are for sale, they might as well display their prices prominently,” January, 1884 – Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
2. Poverty Hollow School, Harwinton, Connecticut – Connecticut State Library, Mills Photograph Collection of Connecticut, 1895-1955 (PG 180)
3. Collis Potter Huntington, 1821-1900 – Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Background from connecticuthistory.org/collis-p-huntington-the-boy-from-poverty-hollow/
"Collis P. Huntington: The Boy from Poverty Hollow By Nancy Finlay
South of Route 4 in Harwinton, Connecticut, where a small stream called Huntington Brook flows into Leadmine Brook, is an area once known as Poverty Hollow. Here, in the early years of the 19th century, William H. Huntington had a 30-acre farm, and he lived with his wife Elizabeth Vincent Huntington and their nine children (three sons and six daughters). The sixth child, born on October 22, 1821, they christened Collis Potter Huntington.
Growing Up in Harwinton
Growing up, times were hard and the Huntington’s farm did not prosper. Neither did a fulling mill and a shingle mill which Huntington’s father operated. The children had to help out on the farm and in the mills, and their schooling, in the local one-room schoolhouse, became irregular. Collis did well in arithmetic, history, and geography, but not in spelling or grammar. He was a big boy and an unruly student, who, when his teacher tried to strike him with a ruler as a punishment, turned on the teacher and fought back.
Another teacher remembered Collis as “very poorly clothed, and not well cared for.” The Huntingtons became so poor and destitute that in 1834 the town selectmen removed Collis and his older brother from the family home and placed them with local farmers. Collis worked for Orson Barber for a year, earning seven dollars a month, then went to work for another neighbor, Phineas Noble, who ran a small store. Part of the time the boy worked as a peddler, selling merchandise from door to door in northwestern Connecticut. Later, still in his teens, he branched out on his own, selling clocks and “Yankee notions” in the South.
Meanwhile, Collis’s older brother Solon left Connecticut and established a store in Oneonta, New York. In 1844, Collis joined him, investing his surprisingly substantial savings in the business, which then became S. & C. P. Huntington. The same year, on September 18, Collis married a distant cousin, Elizabeth Stoddard, of Cornwall, Connecticut. (The marriage lasted until Elizabeth’s death in 1883.)
Collis Huntington and the Central Pacific Railroad
S. & C. P. Huntington quickly became the most successful store in Otsego County. Solon and Collis were both prosperous and respected, but Collis was not content. Like many other young Americans in 1848–1849, he headed west for California upon learning of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. Unlike most of the others, however, who headed straight for the gold fields, Collis opened a store in Sacramento selling mining equipment. While most of the miners wound up broke, Collis Huntington amassed a small fortune. This became the basis for a very large fortune, when, in the 1860s, Huntington became involved in building the Central Pacific Railroad—the line which ran east from California to meet up with Union Pacific, creating the first transcontinental railroad. Huntington’s empire eventually went on to include the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (though many criticized it as built on the typically disingenuous practices of a “robber baron,” such as bribing politicians and withholding dividend payments from minority stockholders).
Despite his success, Huntington never not forget his Connecticut origins. In 1885, he proposed building a chapel behind the Congregational Church in Harwinton in memory of his mother. The little Gothic chapel, with lovely stained glass windows, reached completion in 1887. At its dedication, Huntington, then 66 years old, recalled how his mother, “one of the best women that ever lived,” often “worked into the small hours of the night that her children might be comfortably clothed on the morrow.” He referred bitterly to his forced removal from the family in 1834, saying that “the Harwinton selectmen did not consult Solon or myself or our parents about taking us away from our home . . . We were rudely moved and had to like it.” Nevertheless, he concluded that “as often as I have returned to these my native hills have I been made glad that this was the place where I was born, and that I was born poor, for I think that was the reason, at least in part, of such success in life as I have been able to achieve.” His was the classic success story—a poor boy who grew up to be one of the most powerful and important men in America.
Collis Huntington died on August 13, 1900, at his Great Camp in the Adirondacks. He received a burial in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City. The chapel that he gave in memory of his mother fell into disrepair and was torn down in 1960. At about the same time, the Army Corps of Engineers acquired Poverty Hollow for a flood control project. Huntington’s birthplace had long since been torn down; the remaining houses and other buildings were demolished or moved from the area too and the valley eventually reverted back to forest.
Nancy Finlay grew up in Manchester, Connecticut. She has a BA from Smith College and an MFA and PhD from Princeton University. From 1998 to 2015, she was Curator of Graphics at the Connecticut Historical Society.
WEBSITES
“American Experience: Transcontinental Railroad - Biography: Collis P. Huntington.” PBS.org, 2016. “Harwinton’s History: Collis Potter Huntington.” Harwinton Historical Society, 2016.
PLACES
“Harwinton Historical Society,” 2012.
BOOKS
Harrison, Mitchell C., ed. “Collis Potter Huntington.” In Prominent and Progressive Americans; an Encyclopædia of Contemporaneous Biography, Vol. 1. New York, NY: New York Tribune, 1902.
Evans, Cerinda W. Collis Potter Huntington. Newport News, VA: Mariners’ Museum, 1954.
Lavender, David. The Great Persuader. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1970.
Four Capitalists Who Created California and Their Epic Drive for Money
""The Big Four" was the name popularly given to the famous and influential businessmen, philanthropists and railroad tycoons who built the Central Pacific Railroad, (C.P.R.R.), which formed the western portion through the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains of the First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, built from the mid-continent at the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean during the middle and late 1860s. Composed of Leland Stanford, (1824–1893), Collis Potter Huntington, (1821–1900), Mark Hopkins, (1813–1878), and Charles Crocker, (1822–1888), the four themselves however, personally preferred to be known as "The Associates."
Membership:
Leland Stanford, (1824–1893), – C.P.R.R. President, Stanford University founder.
Collis Potter Huntington, (1821–1900), – C.P.R.R. Vice President, for which the city of Huntington, West Virginia was named. He is also the uncle of Henry E. Huntington, (1850–1927), founder of the famous Huntington Library with its art galleries and gardens in San Marino, California.
Mark Hopkins, (1813–1878), – C.P.R.R. Treasurer
Charles Crocker, (1822–1888), – Construction Supervisor, President of Charles Crocker & Co., a C.P.R.R. subsidiary, later founder of the larger, more extensive Southern Pacific Railroad, another transcontinental link to the east, built later in 1883.
Collectively, the four philanthropically also established the Sacramento Library Association for the state capital in Sacramento, California in 1857, which later established the present Sacramento Public Library.[3]
David Hewes, an enterprising businessman, was called the "maker of San Francisco" for his work in clearing land for development. He was invited to be a part of the "Big Four" but declined due to the financial risks. Over his lifetime he gained and lost several fortunes.[4]
In their time, the four men were sometimes referred to as nabobs or "nobs," a reference to their wealth and influence. When the four built mansions in the same neighborhood of San Francisco, the area quickly became known as Nob Hill, a name it carries today."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIZjftSRzm0
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Orlando Illi Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown CMSgt (Join to see) MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSG David Andrews Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Charles H. Hawes SGT Mark Halmrast CPT Gabe SnellLTC Greg Henning SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL
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