Underneath the Huntington we drive through every day is another Huntington. And under that one, another.

This week I skip the ghost stories and instead tunnel into the strange, forgotten, occasionally scandalous version of the city hiding in plain sight. There were electric streetcars threading the streets, so many downtown movie palaces that 4th Avenue was literally called Theater Row, and another stretch of the same avenue known simply as "the Strip," where you could reportedly buy bootleg whiskey, gamble, and worse.

We meet William Allen Cross, the real-life theater manager who remembered exactly how to buy moonshine, and Genevieve Owens, who grew up near a place Marshall's archives call "the Hanging Tree." That story that leads, remarkably, to the fully documented public execution of Allen Harrison in 1892 in Cabell County, complete with photographs and newspapers. We revisit the 1937 flood through a college student who cheered because her exams were canceled, then had to get home partly by boat. And we end at the one building that refused to disappear: the Keith-Albee.

Moments

Ch. 1 Streetcars (1888) & Camden Park's streetcar origin 00:02:31

Ch. 2 Theater Row on 4th Avenue (40 movie houses) 00:03:31

Ch. 3 The Strand — the theater that bet against talking movies 00:05:47

Ch. 4 "The Strip" — 4th Avenue's bootlegging, gambling & red-light district 00:07:06, and how you actually bought illegal liquor (Crescent Pool Hall, alley joints) (within Strip section)

Ch. 6 Everybody mixed on the Strip — segregation & its contradictions 00:13:59

Ch. 7 The Hanging Tree (oral histories of Genevieve Owens & George Peck Moran) 00:14:44

Ch. 8 Ritter Park; the documented 1892 public execution of Allen Harrison 00:21:55

Ch. 9 "And Then the Water Came" — the 1937 flood through Selma Gail Martin 00:25:11

Ch. 10 The Margaret Theater advertising "still open" during the flood 00:33:16

Ch. 11 Huntington loses its streetcars (final run Nov 7, 1937) 00:34:03

Ch. 12 Neighborhood theaters (14 listed by 1943) 00:35:16

Ch. 13 "Teenage Strangler" — Huntington makes a horror movie 00:36:22

Ch. 14 The Keith-Albee is a survivor 00:37:50

Ch. 15 The strangest Huntington story of all — they were just living 00:39:17

If you have a memory you would want me to talk more about, just send me an email at [email protected]. Or post a comment on the Tri-State Machine FB Group page.

Welcome to the Tri-State Time Machine.

I'm your host Vanessa Hankins. This is a podcast where my guests and I share our memories and present day stories of the Tri-State Area. That's West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.

Nothing too serious, no political views, and no ulterior motives.

We're just here to share our fun stories about this great area.

Whether you're a past resident or a current Tri-State resident, I think you're going to have fun with us.

So join in, press play on your podcast player, and welcome to the Tri-State Time Machine! 

https://ts-time-machine.captivate.fm/episode/strange-huntington-the-city-hiding-underneath-ours

Copyright 2026 Vanessa Hankins

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

This is the Tri-State Time Machine. Each week your host Vanessa

Hankins and her guests share memories and stories about the

past, present, and the future of the tri-state area.

That's West Virginia, Kentucky, and the Ohio areas. If you

used to live here or you currently live here, you're going to catch yourself saying

out loud, wow, I remember that. Now

here's Vanessa. Hey guys, it's Vanessa

and this is the Tri-State Time Machine. This week, we're staying pretty close

to home, but we're looking at Huntington a little differently because one of

the things that I love most about doing this podcast is realizing just how many

versions of this place have existed before the one that we know now.

We drive down 4th Avenue, we walk through Ritter Park, we pass old

buildings downtown, we go to shows, we grab dinner, sit

at red lights, complain about parking, all without really thinking about

what was happening in those exact same spots 50, 75,

Or 100 years ago, and apparently a lot was happening.

There were streetcars running through Huntington. There were so many movie theaters

downtown that part of 4th Avenue was literally called Theater Row.

There was another stretch of 4th Avenue known as the Strip where you could reportedly

find bootleg liquor, gambling, and brothels. There

are old oral histories that mention hangings in the area that we know now as

Ritter Park. Huntington survived a catastrophic flood, lost its

streetcars, lost most of its neighborhood theaters, and at one

point we even made our own low-budget horror movie. So this

week I fell down a rabbit hole, and the deeper I went, the

more I realized that underneath the Huntington that we know is another Huntington,

and underneath that one is another. This isn't really a ghost

story episode, although some of it gets a little creepy.

This is about the strange, forgotten, occasionally scandalous stories

that are hiding in places that we pass every single day. So today

we're taking the Tri-State Time Machine back through some of those old versions of the

city. This is Strange Huntington,

the city hiding underneath ours. And before we get weird,

I want you to picture the city. Before we get to bootleggers and brothels,

I think we need to actually picture Huntington, because if we're imagining

today's downtown with a few old-timey cars added to it, We're

doing this wrong. One of the biggest differences would be the

streetcars. Huntington's electric streetcar system dates all the way back to

1888. There's an old local claim that Huntington had

the second electric streetcar system in the world, although modern researchers

haven't been able to verify that part. But we absolutely know that electric

streetcars became a major part of how our city developed. And here's one of

my favorite connections: Camden Park exists in part because of

the streetcar system. Who knew? In 1902, the

Camden Railway opened a picnic area west of Huntington

specifically to encourage people to ride the streetcars on the

weekends. And then they added a pavilion,

then some rides, and eventually that little streetcar destination

became Camden Park. Which I love because we tend to think of amusement parks as

like destinations that somebody just decided to build, but Camden

Park was basically, how do we get more people to ride the train on Sunday?

And apparently the answer was, give them a roller coaster, and it worked.

So already our map is changing. We're standing downtown,

streetcars are moving through the streets, people aren't really driving anywhere,

or everywhere for that matter, like it is now, and 4th

Avenue is becoming the entertainment center of Huntington, which brings us to

Chapter 2. Huntington had a theater district.

Today, if you say theater in downtown Huntington, Chances are people know

which building you're talking about— the Keith Albee. That would have made absolutely

no sense to anybody living here 100

years ago because Huntington had theaters everywhere.

Research published by Huntington Quarterly found that roughly 40 movie houses operated in

the Huntington area over the course of the 20th century. 40!

That's wild. And by the 1930s, a stretch of

4th Avenue between 8th and 11th Streets was literally

known as Theater Row. You had the State,

Orpheum, Palace, Keith Albee, Roxy,

and the Rinaldo was only a block away on 3rd Avenue.

So think about that for a second. You leave one movie theater, you walk down

the sidewalk, you pass another movie theater, you cross the street,

there's another marquee. People are lining up, cars are going by,

streetcars are going by, restaurants are full. Lights

everywhere. And then in May of 1928,

Huntington gets the enormous new Keith-Albee. It seats around

3,000 people. The West Virginia Encyclopedia describes it as a

$2 million temple of amusement, and the opening included a feature film,

a newsreel, and 5 live stage acts. The building

had 19 uniformed ushers and an 8-piece orchestra with a waltzer

organ. 19 ushers. Can we appreciate that?

I've worked events where I'm trying to figure out how many ushers I need, and

apparently in 1928 the answer was all of them.

And the building itself was part of the attraction. You weren't just going to see

a movie. Going there was an event in and of itself.

And that wasn't unique to the Keith. Movie theaters were one of the major social

centers of a city before television entered people's homes. which makes one of Huntington's

theaters' decisions in 1929 even funnier.

Chapter 3: Huntington's Theater That Bet Against Talking Movies.

Movies with synchronized dialogue— the talkies— exploded in

popularity in the 1920s, and apparently one Huntington theater looked at this

revolutionary new technology and said, mm, we're good. You can

keep that. The Strand Theater announced in January of

1929 that it was discontinuing sound pictures. That belief was that Huntington audiences

didn't like them. So the Strand brought back its live orchestra,

and several months later, the Strand closed. I can't

get over this. Imagine being in the meeting.

Everybody in America says, oh my God, the actors talk now!

But at Huntington, we say, I don't think this is going anywhere. That's

basically somebody in 2008 saying, nobody wants an iPhone.

But here's why I like doing stories like this. History has a tendency to make

people look smarter than they actually were, and we know what technology

succeeded because we're living in the afterword, you know. They didn't.

People were guessing. Business owners made bad calls. Trends changed.

People complained about new technology. Human beings were human beings, which

is important to remember before we get into the part of Huntington where

everybody was apparently breaking the law. Chapter 4:

Fourth Avenue Had Another Name. The Strip. Now this is the

part that originally sent me down this entire rabbit hole. Marshall University has

this enormous oral history collection, more than 800 interviews with people from West

Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio. And one of those interviews was

recorded in 1974 with a man named William Allen Cross.

Cross had managed downtown Huntington theaters, including the State and the

Keith-Albee. And when somebody had asked him about Huntington during

Prohibition, He had stories. Cross

described the portion of 4th Avenue between 10th and 11th Street as

the Strip. According to Marshall's archive, the area

functioned roughly from 1925 to 1945 as a

red-light, gambling, and bootlegging district. Think about

where we're talking about— right downtown Huntington.

Not Chicago, not New York. Not some Appalachian outlaw,

outlaw hidden camp hidden in the mountain. 4th

Avenue downtown. And according to research

built from Cross's oral history, places along the strip included the

Crescent Pool Hall where bootleg whiskey could be bought, and there was also

illegal alcohol available at an apartment above State Theater.

Apartments between the pool hall and the theater were associated with prostitution,

And everywhere around town were what residents called

alley joints, where you could buy illegal alcohol.

So apparently Marshall students knew where some of these were because of

course they did. They were college kids. You guys remember being in college? I do.

So some things truly never change. But I want to stop for a second and

talk about who William Allen Cross actually was because I think that makes the

story so much better. This isn't somebody who sat down years later and researched

Huntington during Prohibition. Cross was part of that Huntington that existed.

worked in its theaters. He managed the theaters downtown, including the Keith Albee

and the State Theater. And when Marshall interviewed him in June of

1974, they weren't asking him to explain Prohibition from

a textbook. They were asking him what he remembered. And

apparently, Bill remembered where you could get liquor.

Marshall's description of the interview very specifically points out that Cross did

not make moonshine himself. He was a buyer. Which is

such a funny distinction to make because basically, let's be

clear, I wasn't making illegal whiskey. I was merely purchasing the

illegal whiskey. And Cross didn't just remember the moonshine that

existed. He talked about where the stills were, how bootleggers sold

their whiskey, how whiskey, wine, and moonshine were made, and even

how the process of buying it worked. He described something called the party

system. And that's sort of the tiny detail that I love about

oral history. Because a newspaper article from the 1920s might tell us that

somebody was arrested for bootlegging. A court record might tell us

how much whiskey that police confiscated. But those records usually

don't tell you, okay, but if I were a regular person in Huntington

and wanted a jar of moonshine on a Friday night, how did I get one?

And Cross remembered that world. And apparently getting liquor wasn't

always just walking into some dark alley and whispering a password through a little door.

There was a social system around it. People knew

people. Somebody knew a supplier. Somebody knew

where the still was. And somebody could get it. And

that's when illegal activity stops looking like a separate underground world and

starts kind of looking like what it was probably, you know, a

network of completely ordinary Huntington people who just knew how things worked then.

Which makes me wonder how many people were participating

who would have absolutely described themselves as a respectable citizen.

Because human beings are funny in that way. Breaking the law?

Absolutely not. But you can pass me that jar, Sean.

That's going to lead us into Chapter 5: How did you actually buy

illegal liquor? This is where Cross becomes fascinating

because he wasn't simply describing something that he had heard about. Marshall's

archive describes him plainly: He didn't make moonshine, he bought it,

and his interview includes discussion of that party system for obtaining the moonshine.

He also identified places where stills operated and described social world around

illegal drinking or illegal alcohol. This is the part where I wish that I could

sit him down today because I have questions. Was everybody pretending they didn't

know? Did respectful people go down there? Did your

neighbors know where you were going? Was it considered scandalous?

Was it dangerous, or was it just normal? Because the picture that emerges from these

accounts isn't necessarily one where illegal nightlife was completely hidden.

It sounds more like everybody knew that it existed, and that even included the law

enforcement. Research drawn from the oral histories say

that bribes involving money or alcohol was known as rake-offs, and

local law enforcement often left the bootleggers alone.

There are even other Marshall interviews from former law enforcement officers discussing

the moonshine and illegal stills and the crime during Prohibition. One

former officer, Herschel Garten, later gave an oral

history covering illegal stills, murders, police procedures, and crime during the

era. So Cross wasn't remembering some completely isolated phenomenon.

This world existed. And I keep coming back to this because people would

walk out of a movie theater and potentially

walk straight into it. And Cross's interview doesn't keep this

confined to downtown. He talked about the locations of stills And about

the process of producing whiskey itself. Because

obviously nobody was operating a giant moonshine still in the middle of 4th Avenue.

The Strip was where some of the alcohol was being consumed and sold, but that

meant somebody further out of town was making it, somebody was transporting it,

somebody was delivering it, somebody downtown knew who to

call. So when we say bootlegging in Huntington, we're really

just talking about a much bigger tri-state network. The hollers and rural

areas surrounding the city were connected to what was happening

downtown, which feels very Appalachian, honestly. The city and the

country were 2 completely separate worlds. They

depended on each other, sometimes for vegetables, sometimes for

livestock, and also for illegal whiskey.

That leads us into Chapter 6: Everybody Mixed on the Strip. There's

another detail about the Strip that surprised me. The CLEO history based on the

Huntington oral histories says that the illegal establishments weren't necessarily divided

socially in the same way that much of legal Huntington was at that time.

The account describes Black residents, white residents, women moving among

multiple illegal establishments. And that gets complicated

because this was also an era of segregation and intense

racial discrimination in Huntington. Marshall's oral history collection contains

accounts of segregation, cross burnings, the Ku Klux Klan,

and later civil rights struggles in Huntington. So, I don't want to romanticize the

Strip as some magical, progressive place. It wasn't. But it

was an interesting— er, it is, to me, an interesting

contradiction. Sometimes societies create strict rules

about who may go where, and then the places already breaking the law

don't obey all of society's other rules either. And that's another

version of Huntington that's easy to lose when we only tell its history through

official institutions. Chapter 7, The Hanging

Tree. Now we're going to leave downtown because this is

probably a story that's going to make a few people message us, and that's okay.

Marshall recorded another oral history in 1998 with

Genevieve Owens, who was born in 1920.

Owens talked about growing up near areas that would now— or that we would now

recognize as Ritter Park, Cabell-Huntington Hospital, and the surrounding

neighborhoods. So the South Side. She remembered the Depression, the

streetcars, a Model T, early radios,

the 1937 flood, neighborhood life, the Ku Klux Klan,

and something that Marshall's archive calls the hanging tree.

Marshall very carefully describes this tree as reported to be

what is now in River Park, and I want to use the same careful language

because oral history is evidence of a story being remembered.

It's not automatically proof that every part of the story happens exactly as

remembered. But here's where it gets interesting. Genevieve Owens

isn't the only person in Marshall's oral history collection connected to this story.

Former Huntington police officer George Peck Moran also spoke

briefly in an interview about hangings in the Ritter Park area. And that caught

my attention. Because Moran gives us a

completely different kind of witness. Marshall actually has more than

one interview with him. He talked about old police uniforms, the city's first

patrol wagon, how prisoners were treated, old police

chiefs, politicians, businesses, carnivals that came through

Huntington, wrestling matches, the red light district, saloons, and

very briefly, hanging in the area— hangings in the area that

we now associate with Ritter Park. Now think about how

valuable that is. Just sit with it for a minute. Here is

somebody whose memories aren't centered around one historical

event. He's basically mentally walking the interviewer through

Old Huntington. This person used to be here. That business was

there. Here's what the police did. Here's who ran things.

Here's where people went. And then mixed into all of that completely ordinary

recollection is this brief mention of hangings, Which almost makes

it more interesting to me because it apparently

wasn't presented like, gather around because I have an unbelievable story. It

was just simply one of the things that he remembered about old Huntington. And

again, I want to keep repeating this distinction: 2 oral

histories mentioning something do not automatically make every detail

historically proven. Memory is messy. Stories are passed

down. People can remember locations incorrectly. But now we've got

Genevieve Owens recalling the Hanging Tree, reported to have been what became Ritter

Park, and a former Huntington police officer, Peck Moran,

also discussing hangings in that general area. That was already enough

to make me think, okay, there's a story here.

And then I kept digging. And this is where the story gets a lot

less mysterious. Because while I was initially treating the Hanging Tree as an old

oral history mystery, There is at least one public

execution in this area that we can document very well. On

November 22nd, 1892, a man named Allen

Harrison was publicly executed along Four Pole Creek in the area that

would later become associated with Ritter Park. And this is not based on only

somebody remembering a story decades later. There are court records.

There are newspaper accounts. There are later local histories.

And there are even photographs. Harrison had been convicted of

murdering a young woman named Betty Adams. His case went all

the way to the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which upheld his

conviction. After the appeal failed, Harrison was

sentenced to a hang in Cabell County. And apparently

Huntington turned it into an event. Contemporary and later

accounts estimate that somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people gathered

for that execution. Think about that. Huntington

itself only had around 10,000 residents at the time. People

reportedly came from Ohio, Kentucky, and other parts of West Virginia.

The crowd around the scaffold was so large that people were climbing trees to get

a better view. The Cincinnati Enquirer covered the execution

the next day with an enormous headline that began, Summoned Before the

Courts Above to Answer for His Fiendish

Deed. Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. And its

reporter described Harrison as being taken from Cabell County Jail through the

crowded Huntington streets and out toward the execution site along Four Pole Creek.

Another surviving newspaper account published by the

Cerrito Advance, which I had never heard of before this, described

thousands of strangers coming into the area to witness it. And can we stop

for a second and just think about that? People traveled here to

watch someone die. It was public entertainment.

Families were living in Huntington. Businesses were open. People were

walking the same general streets that we're talking about throughout this entire

episode. And thousands of them made their way

towards Four Pole Creek because there was going to be an execution.

That's a version of Huntington that is really difficult to imagine now. And

here's another really important distinction: Allen Harrison was not

hanged from a tree. A scaffold was constructed for his execution.

Later accounts place the scaffold in slightly different locations. Some

describe it as near the eastern side of what became Ritter Park, others describe it

closer to the present Huntington High School area, while contemporary newspaper

coverage places the execution in an open field along Four Pole Creek.

So I don't think that we can take Genevieve Owens' memory of a hanging tree

simply as This is the tree where Allen Harrison was hanged, because it

wasn't. At least not according to the evidence that we have. But we

can say that something really interesting—

people in later generations remembered stories about hangings in this

area, and we now know for certain that at least one extremely public

hanging did happen here. And there's something else that makes this particular

story almost surreal. There's photographs. Marshall University's

archives preserve 2 images dated November 22nd,

1892, identified as the last legal execution in

Cabell County. One was taken before the execution and the other

after. So this is not one of those stories where we're trying to reconstruct everything

from whispers and family stories. Someone brought a camera,

thousands of people reportedly watched, newspapers wrote about it,

and somewhere inside all of those people watching was a memory that

survived long enough to become the oral history of Huntington. Now,

does that completely explain Genevieve Owens' hanging tree? No.

Does it explain every reference Peck Moran made of the hangings in the area?

No. And honestly, I think it makes it more interesting because

now, instead of asking, was there really a hanging in Ritter Park?

We know the better question is, how much of what later generations

remember grew out of the events that actually happened here? Because At

least one of them absolutely did. And a little more

than 20 years after Harrison's execution, land in the same general area would

begin to become something completely different— a park.

Eventually one of the prettiest and most peaceful places in Huntington, which means

people today can walk through Ritter Park, take wedding pictures, walk their

dogs, push their kids on the swings, and have absolutely no

idea that somewhere nearby More than a century ago, thousands

of people once gathered to watch a man hang. And that is

exactly what I mean when I say there is another Huntington beneath ours.

It's going to lead us into chapter 8.

We've talked about this before, but if you've missed it, imagine Ritter Park before it

was Ritter Park. And I'm going to slow down on this part because

forget the hanging tree story for a minute. Genevieve Owens interviews

Are so valuable because she remembers this whole area during the '20s and '30s,

meaning that she remembered a Huntington that was still transforming into the Huntington that we

know today. And the more that I read about Genevieve Owens' interview, the more

that I realize I don't want to use her solely for the Hanging Tree because

she remembered an entire way of living that has disappeared.

Genevieve was born in 1920, and when Marshall interviewed her in

1998, They asked her about growing up around what we know

and recognize today as Ritter Park, Cabell Huntington Hospital, and the

surrounding neighborhoods. And look at the things that she

remembered. Like, if you ever get the chance to listen to these oral histories—

streetcars, a Model T Ford, early radios, the Depression,

the '37 flood, World War II, the Ku Klux Klan,

what the area around today's Fairfield Stadium looked like. And

something I think is even more valuable— how neighbors treated one another.

Marshall describes part of her interview as discussing neighborhood

relationships, which is a very academic way of saying

people depended on each other. And that's something that we can

lose when we tell a story through buildings and dates. What did

you do when somebody was sick? Who watched the children? Who

helped when someone didn't have enough? Who owned the first

radio on the street? Did everybody gather around it? Who had a car?

Who didn't? What did kids do when there was no television, internet, or

phone in their pocket? Owens also talked about the morals and expectations

in the 1920s and compared life with the life at the time in her

1998 interview. So she wasn't just telling Marshall,

here's what Huntington looked like. She was telling them, here's what it felt like to

live here. And there's a huge difference there, because I can show you a

photograph of a streetcar. Genevieve Owens could tell you what it was

like when riding one was simply how you got somewhere.

And I want listeners to picture themselves standing in Ritter Park today— the playground, the

paths, the trees, people walking their dogs, wedding

pictures, kids riding bikes— and then mentally remove the version

that you're familiar with, because somebody else stood in that same

land and had an entirely different mental map. That's something that

I don't think that we appreciate enough about local history. Buildings

disappearing is obvious, but sometimes the land itself changes identity.

Eventually nobody remembers what it was before, except

somebody does, and if you're lucky, somebody interviews them.

It's going to lead us into chapter 9. And Then the Water Came.

Genevieve's generation has something else in common. If you spend any

time inside Marshall's oral history collection, one event keeps

appearing over and over again: the flood of 1937.

And that repetition tells you something, because different people were

interviewed about completely different lives, and

somehow they kept eventually arriving at, and then there was

the flood. Reba Booten Davidson remembered it. Pauline

McGraw Blatt remembered it. Selma Gayle Martin remembered it.

Genevieve Owens remembered it. People who had different jobs,

different families, and different experiences all carried memories of the same

weeks. Which makes me think about the events in our own

lives that work like that. The things where you don't have to explain what you

mean. You just say, during the flood, and everybody from your generation

knows exactly what flood you're talking about. Huntington's 1930s said, The

1907 flood is obviously not one of our obscure

pieces of history. People know about it. But I don't think

photographs can fully communicate what it would have been like to experience downtown as

a place that you knew and suddenly watch it become a river.

There are photographs in Marshall's Cabell-Wayne Historical Society collection showing

4th Avenue flooded around the Keith-Albee, the Palace Theater, and the Orpheum.

The water isn't somewhere off in the distance. It's in the buildings.

The streets are water. But this is where the oral histories give us something

that photographs can't. Selma Gayle Martin was a Marshall

student when the flood came, and her account might be my favorite because it

captures something that history books usually don't— how young people

react when they don't yet understand how serious something is.

As the floodwater moved onto the campus at Marshall, Selma

and other students watched from a 3rd floor of Old Main. They saw

water pushing up through manhole covers, and when it became obvious that the water was

surrounding most of the building, the students cheered. Why?

Because exams were canceled. And tell me that that isn't the

most college student reaction imaginable. The

city is experiencing what will become one of the world's worst disasters in history,

and somewhere inside of Old Main, students are yelling, no

exams! And Selma understood the irony of that

years later. She reflected that some students whose homes were safely up in the

mountains weren't worried about the flood and were probably thrilled to get a vacation.

Looking back, she admitted that she hadn't always thought very carefully about what other people

were going through, and then it became real for her because Selma lived on

the west side of Huntington around Adams Avenue and 17th Street, so

really not too far from my house. She wanted to go home, so she

traveled most of the roughly 3 miles on foot and part of it by boat.

Stop and picture that. She's not touring flood damage. She's trying

to get home. The streets she normally walked or rode through are now

water. Eventually, her family's home had around 5 to

5.5 feet of water inside, and even then, her family initially stayed

until the underground gas tank exploded a couple of blocks away from her house and

caught fire. That's when rescue workers evacuated the area. So

within a matter of days, Selma went from, great, exams are

canceled, to now, my house is underwater and now the

neighborhood's on fire. And that is what oral history gives us.

This disaster doesn't arrive already labeled the Great Flood of

1937. It unfolds. One weird thing

happens, and then another, and then something becomes inconvenient.

And then frightening. And eventually you realize you're living through something that people are

going to talk about for the rest of your life. And there's another part of

Selma's account that photographs really can't capture: the smell

and the mess after. When the water finally receded, you didn't

simply unlock the front door and go home. Everything had been sitting in filthy

floodwater. Selma remembered the contents of the house as essentially

waterlogged. Mud was everywhere— rugs, curtains,

brooms, household belongings. Her family had to sweep

everything out and light fire to help dry the house.

So imagine doing that without modern cleanup equipment. You know,

you're— you don't have a commercial dehumidifier being

delivered by a restoration company. And again,

they're not showing up with giant fans. No clicking a button on your phone

and filling out an insurance claim with photographs. You cleaned, you dried what

could be dried, you hoped your fireplace could do its job, and then you threw

away what couldn't. And everybody around you was doing the same thing.

And by the end, Huntington had suffered millions of dollars in damage,

thousands of people had been taken to shelter, and the city had essentially become an

isolated area except by

foot or boat during the worst of it. But I almost think that

Selma's muddy curtains tell the story better than the dollar amount,

because that's the difference between knowing a flood happened and imagining

what it meant to live through one. Another Huntington voice I came

across was Reba Booten Davidson. She was born in 1904 and

moved with her family to Huntington when she was 16. So when Marshall

interviewed her decades later, she could remember Huntington around 1920,

when our downtown theater world was still developing and the city looked

completely different. Her interview includes memories of Huntington's old

department stores, recreation during the 1930s,

automobiles, the Depression, and again the 1937 flood.

And I love adding somebody like Reba because it reminds us that not every old

Huntington memory needs to be dramatic. Somebody remembering where they

shopped is history. Where did you buy your clothes? Where did your mother

take you? What store had the Christmas windows that everyone wanted

to see? Where did teenagers meet? Where did you go on

Sunday? Those places rarely seem historically important while they're

still open. But then they close and the buildings change

and another generation grows up. And eventually somebody says,

wait, what used to be there? There's

also Pauline McGraw Blatt, born in 1903. Her

oral history moves through family life, the Depression, and the

1937 flood. And something that jumped out at me with her,

uh, was the

Fresenier— I don't think I'm saying this right, I'm sorry if I'm not—

Fresenier business, beer business. And this is why

I could spend forever inside these archives. One person's interview

connects us to the flood, another connects us to the theaters and moonshine,

Another connects us to an old local beer business, and suddenly Huntington stops being a

timeline. It becomes a web. These people knew the businesses. They rode

the streets. They watched these buildings go up. They watched some of them come

down. They weren't just studying Huntington and its history.

They were making it accidentally. And this is where researching this kind of

episode changed for me. Originally, I was looking for strange Huntington stories, you know,

like the bootlegging, the strip, the hanging tree, old theaters. Things that would

make us say, wait, that happened here? But the further that I got

into these interviews, the less interested I became in just collecting weird facts, because

the people became more interesting than the facts. William Allen Cross

wasn't a character in a Prohibition story. He was a guy who worked in Huntington

theaters and knew how to buy moonshine. Genevieve Owens wasn't a

woman who remembered the Hanging Tree. She remembered riding streetcars,

radios, neighbors helping neighbors, the Depression, War,

and watching Huntington change around her. George Moran didn't exist to tell us

one creepy Ritter Park story. He remembered police wagons, carnivals,

old businessmen, saloons, politicians, and places that don't

exist anymore. And Sal Miguel Martin? She wasn't just a

historical witness to the flood of 1937. She was a college student

who initially was excited that her exams got canceled and

then had to get home partly by boat. That's history. That's not

dates. That's people. It's going to lead us into Chapter 10.

But one theater apparently stayed open. Now, here's my

favorite tiny flood story. Among all of this

destruction, one theater apparently said, showtime!

The Margaret Theater stood at 8th Avenue and 20th Street, and according

to historian Tony Rutherford, it advertised itself during

the 1930s 1937 flood as the only theater

still open. The message essentially was like, if you

want to see a movie, come to the Margaret. That detail fascinates me

because imagine what had to be happening around you for a movie theater to

advertise, hey, we're still open, come see us! And

yet people apparently wanted somewhere to go. There's something deeply

human in that. During wars, during depressions, Floods.

People still tell stories. People still go to the movies.

And people still want 2 hours where life feels normal. And

now I'm starting to understand why so much of Huntington history keeps leading me back

to theaters. They weren't just businesses. They were where people

gathered. Let's go into chapter 11. Then Huntington lost the

streetcars. Another piece of old Huntington disappeared that same year.

The city streetcar system had survived for decades, but by the

1930s buses were replacing electric rail, and on

November 7th, 1937, the final Huntington streetcar

made its run from Guyandotte to the West End. After

that, Huntington became the first city in West Virginia served entirely by

gasoline-powered buses. So think about 1937:

a catastrophic flood that changes the city, and within the same

year, a transportation system that had shaped Huntington for nearly half a

century Just disappears. It's just gone in a blink of an eye.

If you were a kid born after that, streetcars were already becoming stories

told to you. And that's how fast a city changes.

And that's going to lead us into Chapter 12, Neighborhood Theaters.

And here's another thing that I want to add because it makes Huntington feel bigger.

The downtown theaters weren't the whole story. By 1943,

Huntington City Directory listed 14 operating movie theaters Including

neighborhood theaters from Guyandotte all the way to Canova. There was the

Mecca in Guyandotte, the Fox, the Uptown, the

Westmoor on Adams Avenue, the Park, the Beverly near

Washington Boulevard, and others. And that's the part that really changes the

picture for me. People weren't necessarily making some giant trip downtown every time

they wanted entertainment. Your neighborhood would have its own movie theater.

Imagine that. That's so cool. Like, yeah, here's a couple

bucks, walk down the street with your friends and see a movie, Carly. Like, I

can't even imagine that. And depending on where your grandparents grew up,

they may have had their own theater. That's exactly the kind of thing that I'd

ask listeners about. Which one did your family go to? Have you ever

asked? Did you know to ask? Because I guarantee you somebody

listening has a story. That's going to move us into chapter 13.

Huntington makes a horror movie. And eventually Huntington

graduated from merely showing movies to making one.

In the 1960s, a low-budget movie, Teenage Strangler, was filmed in Huntington.

And if you haven't seen it, please understand we are not talking

about Silence of the Lambs. This is a wonderfully low-budget

movie. Like, I— If you've not seen it, please do.

And if horror's not your thing, I get it, but God, it's such a big

piece of our history. The story centers around a killer targeting teenage

girls and a teenager who becomes a suspect. And because it was

filmed locally, the real entertainment now is spotting old Huntington streets, the

buildings, the storefronts, the cars, and the background. It's

basically accidental historical footage wrapped inside a B-movie,

which means even a ridiculous old horror movie can become a time capsule.

The Teenage Strangler eventually got another life when it appeared on Mystery

Science Theater 3000. So somewhere out there, there are

people who know Huntington not because of Marshall football, not because of the

Keith Albee, but because they watched people make jokes over our

local Strangler movie. And I love that for us. We're going to

move on to chapter 14 and how the Keith Albee is a

survivor. So I'm going to come right back to where we started,

4th Avenue, because almost all of that theater world disappeared.

And yet one giant piece survived, the Keith-Albee. Its

opening in 1928 followed 14 months of construction.

Historic theater sources describe approximately

550 tons of steel, millions of bricks, and an

eventful cost around

$2 million. I mean, that's wild to me.

The auditorium was designed as an atmospheric theater. A night sky

overhead, stars, moving clouds, an enormous

stage, and thousands of seats. I've talked

about the Keith Albee on this podcast before, and anyone that knows me knows that

that's where I now work. But working there has completely

changed the way that I thought about these old buildings, because

eventually you stop looking at them as historic monuments. They're your workplace.

You worry about doors and bathrooms and concessions and catering and

scanners. And why somebody needs 12 very

specific bottles of water in a dressing room. And every once

in a while, you look up and you remember,

oh, people have been doing some variation of this

inside this building since 1928. Different staff,

different performers, different audiences, same room.

Somebody sat in those seats during the Depression. Somebody walked into that

building after surviving the 1937 flood. Somebody saw

their first movie there. They had their first date there. They snuck

into something they weren't supposed to see. They worked there, performed there,

and then went back outside onto 4th Avenue, and it looked nothing like ours

does today. That's the time machine part for me. The

building stayed. The city around it changed.

Chapter 15. And maybe that's the strangest Huntington story of

all. Not bootlegging, not brothels, not the hanging

tree, not the public execution, not the Strangler movie.

It's that none of those people thought that they were living in historic Huntington. They

were just living. The guy buying whiskey on the Strip wasn't thinking,

someday somebody's gonna research this at Marshall University.

The woman riding the streetcar wasn't thinking, this transportation system is just

going to disappear one day. And the kid walking into the Westmore wasn't

thinking, someday nobody's ever going to know that this theater was even

here or existed. Selma Gail Martin wasn't standing in Old Main

thinking, people will talk about what's happening here nearly 100 years from now.

They were just going to work. They were meeting friends. They were getting drunk. They

were seeing movies. They were taking their kids somewhere. They were falling in love,

getting in trouble, cleaning mud out of their houses. Complaining about

Huntington, exactly like us, and then their version of the

city vanished. So now I want

you to do something. The next time that you're driving through Huntington, look around

and ask yourself, what used to be here?

Not just 100 years ago, 20 years ago, 30,

40. What restaurant? What store? What theater?

What school? What neighborhood landmark? What weird

place that everybody knew but nobody bothered to photograph because nobody

imagined it would disappear? Because that's how local history gets

lost. Not because nobody cared. Because

everybody assumed they'd remember, and eventually the people who remembered

weren't here anymore. That's why these old oral histories at Marshall

fascinated me so much. There are more than 800 of them.

Hundreds of ordinary people talking about ordinary life. And buried

inside one of those ordinary lives are something like, oh yeah, there was a red

light district downtown. We used to ride the streetcar. There

was a hanging tree. Here's what happened during the flood.

Those details are the time machine. So I want yours.

What is something about old Huntington, or anywhere in the tri-state, that

somebody told you growing up? Something strange, something

funny, something everybody used to know. A place that

disappeared, a story that you're not even completely sure is

true. And believe me, I come into those stories a lot doing the work on

this podcast. Send it to me. I am begging you, because I'm

pretty sure this isn't the end of Strange Huntington. This is chapter 1.

I'm Vanessa, and this has been Tri-State Time Machine, and I'll see you guys

in the past. Thanks for listening to the

Tri-State Time Machine. If you have a memory you want Vanessa to talk

more about, just send her an email at

[email protected] or

post a comment on the Tri-State Time Machine Facebook page. Did you like the

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