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BARBOUR COUNTY WEST VIRGINIA
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Submitted to the West Virginia Biographies Project by:
Valerie & Tommy Crook
vfcrook@earthlink.net
July 10, 2000
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The History of West Virginia, Old and New
Published 1923, The American Historical Society, Inc.,
Chicago and New York, Volume III,
pg. 493-494
Barbour
COYLE & RICHARDSON. A good example of "the survival
of the fittest" is the honored establishment of Coyle &
Richardson, the oldest department store in the southern
part of the state and a business whose growth has been
typical of its home city of Charleston, a town of wide
reputation for good taste in dress, to the demands of whose
exclusive set this concern has largely catered.
Starting in a modest, way in 1884, in a small building
on the river front, a high standard of business ethics was
laid down as a sure foundation for sound, enduring growth,
and during the successive changes brought about by increas-
ing need of space the firm has been a pioneer in the develop-
ment of Charleston's retail business section as well as in
the leadership of movements for shorter hours and the im-
provement of working conditions. From a one-story, twenty
foot frontage, the store has grown to a six-story and base-
ment fire-proof building 50 by 115 feet, the larger part of
which it occupies, doing a business of well over half a
million dollars a year. The concern has under contempla-
tion for 1923 a new building that will double its present
facilities.
George F. Coyle was born in Berkeley County, West Vir-
ginia, and J. Lynn Richardson, in Frederick County, Mary-
land. They became associated through clerkships in Staun-
ton, Virginia, later forming a partnership in a small store in
Winchester, Virginia, which they sold in 1880, renewing
their firm name in Charleston four years later. The business
was incorporated in 1913 with a capital stock of $80,000,
which was increased in 1921 to $225,000. Mr. Richardson
died May 11, 1915. He was for many years a vestryman
in St. John's Episcopal Church, a republican in politics,
and one of the original stockholders in the Kanawha Na-
tional Bank, as was Mr. Coyle. He was a polished gentle-
man of the old business school that characterized the com-
mercial world of the '80s, yet kept ever abreast of the
progress of the times.
Mr. Coyle, the present head of the business, is an elder
in the First Presbyterian Church, an officer in the Rotary
Club of Charleston, and takes a prominent part in the
charitable and civic affairs of the community. He married
in 1884, and has two children, a married daughter and a
son, George Lacy Coyle, who is actively associated with his
father in the management of the business.
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