Coyle and Richardson Department Store Barbour County, WV ********************************************************************** USGENWEB NOTICE: These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by any other organization or persons. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material, must obtain the written consent of the contributor, or the legal representative of the submitter, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. ********************************************************************** Submitted by: Valerie Crook 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.