Collis Potter Huntington died in August 1900 with a fortune worth roughly $36 billion in today’s currency, making him one of the wealthiest men in American history. The Southern Pacific Railroad stretched 9,600 miles from California to New Orleans. The Central Pacific had formed the western half of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. His nephew and heir, Henry Edwards Huntington, had built his own empire: the Pacific Electric Railways’ 1,300 miles of interurban red cars and the Los Angeles Railways’ 386 miles of yellow cars.
The Huntingtons did not simply invest in Southern California. They built it, named it after themselves, and sold it off piece by piece. Yet by 1961 the family fortune had vanished, and the red cars that had created their empire became museum pieces. The Huntington story began far from the California coast, in a Connecticut glen called Poverty Hollow.
The lineage traced to Simon Huntington, born in Norwich, England in 1583. In 1633 Simon boarded a ship for America with his pregnant wife and five children. He contracted smallpox during the crossing and died at sea. His widow arrived alone, delivered her child, and carried the Huntington name into the colonies.
By the early nineteenth century, his descendants struggled to survive on the rocky soil of Harwinton. There, on October 22, 1821, William and Elizabeth Huntington gave birth to Collis Potter Huntington. Collis’s education ended at fourteen, when local authorities apprenticed him to a farmer for $7 per month plus room, board, and two suits of work clothes. The next year he clerked for a grocer, saving every penny.
When his savings reached $175, he bought leather knapsacks, filled them with crockery, cutlery, and trinkets, and set out on foot as a Yankee peddler. Walking from farm to farm, he timed his arrivals to coincide with meal times, accepting hospitality while displaying his goods. Locals remembered him as a tough youth who could whip any of the other boys, a couple at a time if he had to. As capital accumulated, he bought a horse, then a wagon, and expanded his territory into the South.
When gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, Collis recognized that the real opportunity lay in supplying miners rather than joining them. In August 1849 he sailed to California. By 1855 he had opened a hardware store in Sacramento with partner Mark Hopkins, selling picks, shovels, and every implement a miner required. While miners went boom and bust, the store generated steady profits.
In 1860, a young engineer named Theodore Judah approached Sacramento’s merchant class with an audacious vision: a railroad over the Sierra Nevada linking California to the nation. Most dismissed him as a dreamer, but Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker saw the potential. These four hardware merchants became known as the Big Four, men who would reshape the West through engineering brilliance and systematic corruption. The Central Pacific Railroad was incorporated in 1861 with Collis as vice president.
Congress provided unprecedented subsidies, land grants totaling 20 million acres, and loan guarantees exceeding $60 million. Even these incentives proved insufficient for the Big Four’s ambitions. They created the Contract and Finance Corporation, a construction company wholly owned by themselves. As heads of the Central Pacific, they paid this company extravagant sums to build the railroad.
The railroad cost approximately $36 million to construct; the Contract and Finance Corporation billed $79 million. The Big Four pocketed the difference. Beyond financial manipulation, they had mastered political corruption. Historian Matthew Josephson labeled men like Huntington robber barons who had achieved systematic political corruption.
On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific joined east and west with a golden spike. The Big Four expanded the Southern Pacific into a 9,600-mile behemoth, creating what critics called the octopus, its tentacles wrapped around California’s economy. By the 1890s Collis had become one of the most hated railroad men in the country, a symbol of the greed and corruption of late nineteenth-century business. Collis died suddenly on August 13, 1900.
Henry expected to assume control of the railroad empire. Instead, bondholder representative James Speyer blocked him, forcing Henry to sell his interests to E. H. Harriman.
The disappointment redirected the family’s ambitions and created a new empire from land, electricity, and track. With his inheritance, approximately $12 billion in today’s currency, Henry pivoted to Southern California. In 1898 he purchased the Los Angeles Railway. In 1901 he formed the Pacific Electric Railway.
His strategy combined transportation, real estate, and utilities in a self-reinforcing cycle: purchase undeveloped land, extend trolley lines to reach it, provide electric power, then sell subdivided lots to settlers who could now commute to Los Angeles. By 1910 the Pacific Electric spanned 1,300 miles. Its red cars connected downtown to Huntington Beach, named in his honor after he extended service there in 1904, as well as Newport Beach, Redondo Beach, Long Beach, and San Pedro. Henry emerged as Southern California’s largest landowner, controlling hundreds of thousands of acres.
His Pacific Light and Power Company generated electricity through the Big Creek hydroelectric facility, producing 10,000 horsepower. He owned the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, Newport News Shipbuilding on the Atlantic coast, and a San Marino estate with a bowling alley, billiard room, and aviary filled with tropical birds. Henry’s success generated controversy. Farmers resented extortionate shipping rates.
Commuters fumed over poor service. Frank Norris published The Octopus in 1901, a novel denouncing the Southern Pacific’s abuses. Congress had granted over 100 million acres to railroad corporations. The revolving door between railroad management and government, with Leland Stanford serving simultaneously as Central Pacific president and California governor, exemplified what historian Mark Wahlgren Summers called the era’s carnival of corruption.
The family’s scandals matched its power. Collis’s widow Arabella inherited over $50 million, instantly becoming the wealthiest woman in America. Her origins remained deliberately obscured. Born somewhere in the South around 1850, she appeared in New York claiming to be Mrs.
John Warsham, though historians believe this marriage was likely a sham. Most concluded that Collis, married at the time to his invalid first wife, fathered a son, Archer, during a fourteen-year affair. Ward McAllister, arbiter of New York’s high society, demanded a $9,000 bribe for social introductions. When Collis refused, McAllister leaked gossip ensuring their permanent exile from polite society.
In 1913 the 63-year-old Henry married the 63-year-old Arabella, his uncle’s widow, in Paris. Society recoiled at the spectacle of a nephew marrying his aunt by marriage. Henry’s first marriage to Mary Alice Prentice produced four children. Howard Edwards Huntington worked in the family business but died of stomach cancer at age 46 in March 1922.
His death occurred within days of the arrival at San Marino of Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows experienced simultaneously. Archer Milton Huntington, almost certainly Collis’s biological child from the affair with Arabella, followed an entirely different path. He showed no interest in business. In 1904 he founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York City.
He founded or funded the American Numismatic Society, the Museum of the American Indian, the Mariners Museum, and Brookgreen Gardens. When Arabella died in 1924, she left her entire estate to Archer. He gave away virtually everything. The Huntington dynasty’s decline traced multiple trajectories.
Henry sold his Pacific Electric interest to the Southern Pacific in 1910 and relinquished control in the great merger of 1911. Without the ability to extend lines strategically, his land development business lost its competitive advantage. Technology delivered the second blow. The 1920s witnessed the automobile’s rise.
By 1920, 160,000 cars clogged Los Angeles streets. Streetcars stuck in gridlock hemorrhaged passengers to private automobiles, creating a death spiral. Declining ridership forced service cuts, which pushed more riders to automobiles, which made streetcars even less attractive. Service cutbacks accelerated during the Depression.
The last Pacific Electric passenger service ended in 1961. Henry’s financial decline also stemmed from insatiable collecting. After retiring from active management by 1916, he devoted himself to amassing rare books, manuscripts, and art. By his death he had acquired 50 book collections and spent so lavishly that his wealth nearly halved.
Friends warned he was not leaving sufficient endowment to keep his institution free to the public. The warnings proved prophetic when the Huntington Library began charging admission in the 1980s. Henry died May 23, 1927 during surgery in Philadelphia. His estate totaled just under $43 million, approximately $750 million today, plus the $30 million collection left to the Huntington Library.
The dispersal accelerated across generations. Howard’s widow remarried, and his children pursued various careers, none maintaining business empires. When Marian died in 1973, the last of Henry’s children, the family’s wealth had fragmented into trusts bearing no resemblance to Collis’s consolidated empire. About 70 percent of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation; 90 percent lose it by the third.
Collis escaped Poverty Hollow through relentless ambition, but his descendants inherited comfort without hunger. The empire dissolved into trust fund disbursements and philanthropic gifts. The dynasty that built Los Angeles’ beaches watched the automobile destroy everything they had created.