He was the adopted son of ¤Samuel Huntington, president of the Continental congress, and was graduated at Yale in 1780 as valedictorian, the youngest member of his class. He gained his medical training under the direction of his brother, Dr. James Cogswell, at the Soldiers' hospital in New York city. He successfully removed a cataract from the eye and tied the carotid artery in 1803, the earliest date recorded in the United States for the accomplishment of either operation. He was married to Mary Austin Ledyard and settled in New Haven. Their daughter, Alice, was rendered deaf and dumb through the effect of a severe illness, and this affliction, and the father's efforts to instruct the child, led him to establish in New Haven in 1820 the first asylum for the care and education of the deaf and dumb in America. He also founded the retreat for the insane in Hartford. He presided over the Connecticut medical society for ten years. He died in Hartford, Conn., Dec. 10, 1830.

Professor of Latin and Greek at Columbian University.

He was CT superior court judge (1793-1798)

Among other enterprises, he built the Southern Pacific railroad, from San Francisco through Los Angeles, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, a track from ocean to ocean, and the merging of twenty-six corporations with 9,000 miles of track into the organization known as the Southern Pacific company.

He then pushed his connections westward from Virgina, through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi, until he was able to ride his own private car over his own tracks from the gateway of the Old Dominion on the Atlantic to the Golden Gate on the Pacific coast, a feat accomplished by no other man in America.

He also founded the city of Newport News, VA, and invested more than $7,000,000 in a ship-yard there, which employed 4,000 men and turned out battleships. He there gave workmen every inducement to own their own homes.

He helped repulse the British at Danbury in April, 1776.

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