Remembering H. O. Via
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H.O. Via stands in the doorway of his popular 9th Street restaurant.
Courtesy of the West Virginia and Regional History Center at WVU
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H.O. Via was an early business leader in Huntington.
Via arrived in the city as
a young man in March of 1872,
only a few months after the new community received its
official charter from the West Virginia Legislature.
Leaving his home in
eastern Virginia, he had bounced his way from
White Sulphur Springs to Charleston on a stagecoach. From
Charleston, he had continued on to Huntington
aboard a passenger train, traveling over the
newly laid tracks of the Chesapeake &
Ohio Railroad.
It took Via three days to
travel the 125 miles from White
Sulphur to Charleston. A half century later, in the
1920s, he looked back in a newspaper interview,
offering some vivid recollections of
that long-ago stage trip:
“It was not like riding
one of today’s modern buses,” Via recalled.
“Going up one mountain, all the male passengers had to get
out and walk. The mud was too deep and the hill too
steep for the six horses pulling us. There
were six of us men and one woman.
The woman rode.”
Arriving in Huntington, Via first worked briefly as the city’s
wharf master. Later he opened a restaurant on the east
side of 9th Street between 3rd and 4th avenues. The
restaurant proved to be a popular,
long-running venture.
In his “Cabell County Annals and Families,” published in 1935,
Huntington’s premier historian George S. Wallace
wrote that Via’s restaurant “served good
meals. Now in a ripe and vigorous old
age he is in charge of Camden Park.”
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Note: This Article and picture appeared in the Herald-Dispatch Newspaper on Dec.17, 2024.
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