Editing Collis Potter Huntington (section)

===Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, new cities and a shipyard===
{{Main|Peninsula Extension|Chesapeake and Ohio Railway|Huntington, West Virginia}}
Following the [[American Civil War]], efforts were renewed in Virginia to complete a canal or railroad link between Richmond and the [[Ohio River]] Valley. Before the war, the [[Virginia Board of Public Works]] and the [[Virginia Central Railroad]] had provided financial assistance to construct a state-owned link through the [[Blue Ridge Mountains]]. It had been completed along this route as far as the upper reaches of the [[Shenandoah Valley]] when the War broke out.

Officials of the Virginia Central, led by company president [[Williams Carter Wickham]], realized that they would have to get capital from outside the economically devastated South in order to rebuild. They tried to attract British interests, without success. Finally, Major Wickham succeeded in getting Collis Huntington interested helping to complete the line.

Beginning in 1871, Huntington oversaw completion of the newly formed [[Chesapeake and Ohio Railway]] (C&O) from [[Richmond, Virginia|Richmond]] across [[Virginia]] and [[West Virginia]] to reach the [[Ohio River]]. There, with his brother-in-law [[Delos W. Emmons]], he established the [[planned city]] of [[Huntington, West Virginia]]. He became active in developing the emerging southern West Virginia [[bituminous coal]] business for the C&O.

Beginning in 1865, Huntington had been acquiring land in Virginia's eastern [[Tidewater region of Virginia|Tidewater region]], an area not served by extant railroads. In 1880, he formed the Old Dominion Land Company and turned these holdings over to it.
[[File:Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern RR 1882.jpg|thumb|Share of the [[Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad|Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwestern Railroad Company]], issued 18 August 1882, signed by Huntington]]
[[File:Collis Potter Huntington by William Keith, c1900.jpg|thumb|upright|Huntington in later life.]]
Beginning in December 1880, he led the building of the C&O's [[Peninsula Subdivision]], which extended from the [[Church Hill Tunnel]] in Richmond east down the [[Virginia Peninsula]] through [[Williamsburg, Virginia|Williamsburg]] to the southeastern end of the Peninsula on the harbor of [[Hampton Roads]] in [[Warwick County, Virginia]]. Through the new railroad and his land company, coal piers were established at Newport News Point.

It may have taken more than 50 years after Virginia's first railroad operated for the lower Peninsula to get a railroad, but once work started, it progressed quickly. In a manner he had previously deployed, notably with the transcontinental railroad, and the line to the Ohio River, work began at both Newport News and Richmond. The crews at each end worked toward each other. The crews met and completed the line 1.25 miles west of [[Williamsburg, Virginia|Williamsburg]] on October 16, 1881, although temporary tracks had been installed in some areas to speed completion.

Huntington and his associates had promised they would provide rail service to [[Yorktown, Virginia|Yorktown]] where the United States was celebrating the centennial of the surrender of the British troops under [[Lord Cornwallis]] at Yorktown in 1781, an event considered most symbolic of the end of [[American Revolutionary War]]. Three days after the last spike ceremony, on October 19, the first passenger train from Newport News took local residents and national officials to the [[Cornwallis Surrender Centennial Celebration]] at Yorktown on temporary tracks that were laid from the main line at the new [[Lee Hall, Virginia|Lee Hall Depot]] to Yorktown.

No sooner had the tracks to the new coal pier at Newport News been completed in late 1881 than the same construction crews were put to work on what would later be called the Peninsula Subdivision's Hampton Branch. It ran easterly about 10 miles into [[Elizabeth City County, Virginia|Elizabeth City County]] toward [[Hampton, Virginia|Hampton]] and [[Old Point Comfort]], where the [[U.S. Army]] base at [[Fort Monroe]] guarded the entrance to the harbor of Hampton Roads from the Chesapeake Bay (and the Atlantic Ocean). The tracks were completed about 9 miles to the town which became [[Phoebus, Virginia|Phoebus]] in December 1882, named in honor of its leading citizen, [[Harrison Phoebus]].<ref>{{cite news| url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3943/is_/ai_n8843892 | work=Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Magazine | title=A new station for mile post zero | year=1999}} {{Dead link|date=May 2011|bot=RjwilmsiBot}}</ref> The new branch line served both the older [[Hygeia Hotel]] and the new [[Hotel Chamberlain]], popular destinations for civilians. During the first half of the 20th century, excursion trains were operated to reach nearby [[Buckroe Beach]], where an [[amusement park]] was among the attractions for both church groups and vacationers.

At the formerly sleepy little farming community of Newport News Point, Huntington began other, building the landmark [[Hotel Warwick]] and founding the [[Northrop Grumman Newport News|Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company]]. This became the largest privately owned shipyard in the United States.

Huntington is largely credited with vision and the combination of developments which created and built a vibrant and progressive community. The 15 years of rapid growth and development led to the incorporation of [[Newport News, Virginia]] as a new [[independent city]] in 1896. It is one of only two independent cities in Virginia that were so formed without developing first as an [[incorporated town]].{{citation needed|date=October 2019}}

Near the tracks of the C&O's Hampton Branch was a [[normal school]], dedicated in its earliest years to training teachers to educate the South's many [[African-American]] [[freedmen]] after the Civil War and abolition of slavery. Both adults and children were eager to learn. Most southern blacks had been denied opportunities for education literacy before the Civil War. The school which developed to become modern-day [[Hampton University]] was first led by former Union General [[Samuel C. Armstrong|Samuel Chapman Armstrong]]. Perhaps the best known of General Armstrong's students was a youth named [[Booker T. Washington]]. He later was hired as principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, another [[historically black college]], and developed it into [[Tuskegee University]]. When Sam Armstrong suffered a debilitating paralysis in 1892 while in New York, he returned to Hampton in a [[private railroad car]] provided by Huntington, with whom he had collaborated on black education projects.

In the lower Peninsula, Collis and other Huntington family members and their Old Dominion Land Company were involved in many aspects of life and business. They founded schools, museums, libraries and parks among their many contributions. In Williamsburg, Collis' Old Dominion Land Company owned the historic site of the 18th-century capital buildings. This was transferred to the women who were the earliest promoters of what became [[Preservation Virginia]] (formerly known as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities). This site was later a key piece of the [[Abby Aldrich Rockefeller|Abby]] and [[John D. Rockefeller Jr.]]'s massive restoration of the former colonial capital city. They developed [[Colonial Williamsburg]], one of the world's major tourist attractions.
[[File:Collis Huntington Mausoleum 1024.jpg|thumb|The mausoleum of Collis P. Huntington in [[Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx, New York)]] ]]

Huntington did not neglect his namesake city at the other end of the C&O. In order to supply [[freight car]]s to the C&O, and by extension to the Southern Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads as well, Huntington was a major financier behind [[Ensign Manufacturing Company]]. He based the company in Huntington, West Virginia, directly connecting to the C&O; Ensign was incorporated on November 1, 1872.<ref>{{cite web| url=http://www.midcontinent.org/rollingstock/builders/ensign.htm| title=Ensign Manufacturing Company| publisher=Mid-Continent Railway Museum| date=April 9, 2006| access-date=April 15, 2008}}</ref><ref>{{White - American railroad freight car|page=142}}</ref>

After Huntington's death in 1900, his nephew, [[Henry E. Huntington]], assumed leadership of many of his industrial endeavors. The younger man quickly sold off all of the Southern Pacific holdings. He and other family members also continued and expanded many of the senior Huntington's cultural and philanthropic projects, in addition to developing their own.

Historian Howard Jay Graham has summarized Huntington's business acumen:<ref>Howard Jay Graham, "Reviews of Books," ''Journal of Economic History'' (June 1955) 15#1 DOI:
10.1017/s0022050700058149 </ref><blockquote>Huntington's career affords unique opportunity for study of the promoter's function—for observing "the entrepreneur as innovator"—hedging into the Central through a cautiously conceived wagon road to the booming Comstock; gaining state and county aid, cost data, experience in construction and finance; thus discovering the immense liberality of the federal subsidy; mobilizing every resource and building through to Ogden on a revolving fund basis; netting perhaps a million by these means; then, half-reluctantly, beginning over, making the C.P. build
the S.P., and when it had, reversing the favorable leases, fattening up the Southern, reaping a second harvest from its bonds and stocks, also taken originally on construction contracts. </blockquote>