132148256

Henry Edwards Huntington, son of Solon and Harriet Saunders Huntington, was born in Oneonta, New York, on February 27, 1850. He was educated in public and private schools of the immediate vicinity and at the age of seventeen embarked on his first business venture as clerk in a local hardware store. Two years later he obtained a position in a wholesale hardware firm of New York City. It was here that his uncle, Collis P. Huntington, first took note of his rapidly broadening capacities and in 1874 drafted him to manage a sawmill recently acquired at St. Albans, West Virginia. Here ties were cut for construction work on the Chesapeake & Ohio, a railroad which had been recently acquired by C.P. Huntington in his scheme of linking the Pacific with the Atlantic by means of a southern route through New Orleans. Successful in this venture, the young saw mill manager bought the mill himself, and in 1880 sold the successful business to become superintendent of construction of the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern Railway, again at the request of his uncle. Rapidly advancing by means of a natural sense of business efficiency combined with constant application to details, he became in 1884 superintendent of the Kentucky Central, passing in the next year to the receivership of the same road, a subsidiary of the Chesapeake & Ohio system, and in 1886 to the post of its vice president and general manager. Leaving this post, from 1890 to 1892 he was vice president and general manager of the Elizabeth, Lexington & Big Sandy and the Ohio Valley Railways, now assimilated in the Chesapeake & Ohio system. In 1892 he removed to San Francisco to take the post of assistant to the president of the Southern Pacific, which at that time included the Central Pacific as well. This position really meant that he was the direct personal representative of C.P. Huntington, the president, on the Pacific Coast, while his uncle kept his own headquarters in New York. In 1900 Henry E. Huntington became second and then first vice president of the Southern Pacific, and in that same year his uncle died, leaving the nephew heir to a large portion of his estate. Shortly after, though logical head of the Southern Pacific Company, he sold the control to E.H. Harriman, and entered on a new field of endeavor.While in San Francisco he had occasion to enter into the affairs of the Market Street Cable Company, later becoming its president, and in making a study of the conditions surrounding its operation he became impressed with the immense potentialities which electric railways possess for building up not only a city itself, but also the surrounding country for a radius of fifty or sixty miles. Removing to Los Angeles, he purchased a controlling interest in the trolley lines then in operation and shortly rejuvenated them. Keeping always in mind the development of the surrounding country, he built and developed the Pacific Electric, and sent its radii out to such distant points as Riverside, Santa Ana, Long Beach and other points. Los Angeles grew amazingly, and the little towns began a steady development. In 1910 Mr. Huntington sold his interest in the Pacific Electric to the Southern Pacific, retaining ownership of the trolley lines in Los Angeles proper known as the Los Angeles Railway. Sale of his interest in the Chesapeake and Ohio lines in the East, left his chief railway interests electrical, all within the territory embraced by Los Angeles city. He was chairman of the Board of Directors of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, the largest privately owned concern of its kind in existence, and president of the Huntington Land and Improvement Company, which came into existence as a result of the purchase of real estate at the time of the Pacific Electric development, and owned much real estate in and around Los Angeles. In addition to holding these offices he was a director in some twenty other organizations.From 1910 until his death in 1927 his chief interest was devoted to the collection and development of what has since resulted in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, an institution located on his private estate at San Marino, surrounded by gardens notable throughout the world. The Art Gallery, notable as possessing the finest extant collection of canvases of the English portrait painters of the period of Reynolds and Gainsborough, is located in his private home, while the Library, distant a few hundred feet in a fine building of its own, houses a collection of English literature unsurpassed in America, of American History perhaps unsurpassed in the world in point of rarity, and of early printed books unequalled outside of Europe, the whole supported by an untold wealth of unpublished material in manuscript form.