Henry Edwards Huntington

American, 1850 - 1927

BiographyHenry Edwards Huntington was born on February 27, 1850, in Oneonta, New York, the fourth of seven children of Harriet (Saunders) and Solon Huntington (1812-90), a merchant. Completing his formal education at the age of seventeen, Huntington spent the 1870s pursuing unrewarding work in hardware stores in New York and sawmills in West Virginia. On November 17, 1873, he married Mary Alice Prentice (1852-1916), a niece by marriage of his uncle, Collis Potter Huntington. From 1881-85 he oversaw the laying of railroad track in Kentucky and Tennessee on behalf of Collis, who arranged for him to become superintendent of the Kentucky Central Railroad Company in 1885. A keen bibliophile, Henry Huntington began to collect rare books after moving to San Francisco in 1892, where he became first assistant to his uncle (then president of the Southern Pacific Company of San Francisco). When Collis died in August 1900, Henry (along with his uncle's widow, Arabella [Yarrington] Huntington) inherited a sizeable portion of the estate. Increasingly enamored of southern California, he devoted the 1900-10 period to developing electric street railways in Los Angeles, speculating in real estate, and developing the ranch property in San Marino that he had purchased in 1903 (now The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens). The house he built there from 1908-10 was decorated with Arabella Huntington's advice, and under the supervision of the art dealer Joseph Duveen, who encouraged Henry to embark on an ambitious scheme of art collecting. Having been divorced in 1906 on grounds of desertion, he married Arabella on July 16, 1913, to the dismay of his children and the amusement of the press. He had largely retired from business in 1910 and increasingly devoted his attention to his San Marino property and collections which, out of affection for his adoptive home of southern California, he ultimately transferred to the state as "a free public library, art gallery, museum and park." Following his death on May 23, 1927, he and his second wife (who had died three years earlier) were buried together in a mausoleum on the grounds.

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