History
The first permanent settlement in modern-day Huntington was founded in 1775 as "Holderby's Landing." The city of Huntington was named for Collis P. Huntington, who built it as the western terminus for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) on the land west of the mouth of the Guyandotte River at the Ohio River. It was created as a railroad town for the C&O, when it initially stretched from Richmond, Virginia to the Ohio River. 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.
Huntington 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, Indiana.
At the time of Huntington's founding, Holderby's Landing was already the home of Marshall College, a normal school that had been founded in 1837 as Marshall Academy by John Laidley in honor of his friend, US Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Marshall. Originally, Marshall Academy was essentially a boarding school, for wealthy high school students. In 1857, the school became Marshall College, which in turn became a public institution in 1867. The college later became Marshall University in 1961 . Huntington is also now effectively a regional medical community – the two hospitals, St. Mary's and Cabell Huntington Hospital, are the largest employers – and a university town, thanks to the presence of Marshall University, which has an enrollment of approximately 16,000 students.
In the 1970s, federal urban renewal programs destroyed part of the downtown. However, in 2005 downtown again began to prosper with construction of the Pullman Square, retail and entertainment lifestyle center. The Harris Riverfront Park promenade is now well-attended along the Ohio River downtown.
Read more about this topic: Huntington, West Virginia
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“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)