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.

Much of the railroad and industrial development which Collis P. Huntington envisioned and led are still important activities in the early 21st century.

He never forgot what he thought was the untapped potential of the area, where the James River emptied into the large harbor of Hampton Roads.

[1] In the late 1850s, Huntington and Hopkins joined forces with two other successful businessmen, Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker, to pursue the idea of creating a rail line that would connect America's east and west.

The joining was celebrated by the driving of the golden spike, provided for the occasion as a gift to the CPRR by San Francisco banker and merchant David Hewes.

[10] Following the American Civil War, efforts were renewed in Virginia to complete a canal or railroad link between Richmond and the Ohio River Valley.

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.

Beginning in 1865, Huntington had been acquiring land in Virginia's eastern Tidewater region, an area not served by extant railroads.

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.

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.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

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.

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:[14]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.

His main duties were selling company stocks and bonds and acting as the chief lobbyist in Washington, where his two main challenges were to block federal support for a proposed rival transcontinental route, the Texas and Pacific Railway (in which he succeeded) and to postpone payment of the $28 million in cash loans the government had made to the Central Pacific (in which he did not).

After Colton's death, litigation opened his files in 1883 and Huntington's letters proved a huge embarrassment, with their detailed descriptions of lobbying, payoffs, and bribes to government officials.

They showed Huntington to be an active, profane, and cynical promoter of his companies and display his eagerness to use money to bribe congressmen.

[18] His biographer says, he was vindictive, sometimes untruthful, interested in comparatively few things outside of business, and disposed to resist the idea that his railroad enterprises were to any degree burdened with public obligations.

There is, on the other hand, no question with respect to his indomitable energy, his shrewdness in negotiation, his independence of thought and raciness of expression, and his grasp of large business problems.

He was the dominant spirit among the small group of men who built up the Southern Pacific system, and that great organization remains his monument.

[19] According to historian Richard J. Orsi, [Huntington] was an ardent opponent of racial prejudice and discrimination....Huntington had been an abolitionist before the Civil War, and he later donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to support African American churches in California, and schools and colleges in the southern states....Though it was politically unwise, Huntington ordered his companies to give equal employment and pay to black workers, and he publicly opposed the exclusions of black and other non-white children from public schools, as well as other “Jim Crow” restrictions then being enacted in the South and elsewhere.

Clara Elizabeth Prentice-Huntington (1860–1928), as she was called, married Prince Franz Edmund Joseph Gabriel Vitus von Hatzfeldt-Wildenburg, a.k.a., Francis Hatzfeldt[21] of the House of Hatzfeld, Germany, on October 28, 1889.

Archer M. Huntington became a well-known Hispanist and founded The Hispanic Society of America, a museum and rare-books library dedicated to Spanish and Portuguese history, art, and culture, based in upper Manhattan, in New York City.

His last will directed that if his stepson should die childless (which he did), Huntington's Fifth Avenue mansion or the proceeds from the sale of the property would go to Yale University.