Collis Potter Huntington (1821–1900) was an American railway pioneer and tycoon. He facilitated the Central Pacific Railroad’s expansion across the West, making the first transcontinental railroad possible in 1869.
Born in Harwinton, Connecticut, Huntington was an itinerant peddler and shopkeeper in Oneonta, New York. He went to California in 1849 and pioneered the Central Pacific Railway (finished in 1869) and the Southern Pacific Railroad (1881.) He became president, together with the allied steamship companies.
Huntington also extended the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway railroad lines, which he had bought in 1869, to link with the Southern Pacific, forming a 4,000-mile (6,440-kilometer) continuous track from San Francisco to Newport News, Virginia. Subsequently, he completed tracks to southern California, El Paso, Texas, and New Orleans, constituting a second transcontinental route.
Biographies include Cerinda W. Evans’s Collis Potter Huntington (2 vols., 1954) and David Lavender’s The Great Persuader (1970.)
Huntington’s nephew, Henry Edwards Huntington (1850–1927,) also a railroad executive, acquired a massive art collection and library, which he bequeathed to the nation in 1922, together with his estate in Pasadena, California.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Collis Potter Huntington
Whatever is not nailed down is mine. What I can pry loose is not nailed down.
—Collis Potter Huntington
Topics: Property, Possessions
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