In 1919, the West Virginia Legislature wrote a new charter for the City of Huntington. Under it, all three commissioners could be from the same party. As in the former charter, the commissioner receiving the highest number of votes was elected mayor.
Charles William Campbell was the first mayor elected under the new charter.
Campbell was born at Red Sulphur Springs in Monroe County in 1856, when the county was still part of Virginia. As a young man, he read for the law and, once he was admitted to the bar, he located first in Lincoln County, and then came to Huntington. He was never a judge, but his considerable achievements in court prompted many of his friends and associates to address him as “Judge Campbell.”
In 1904, he was the Democratic nominee for judge of the Cabell-Lincoln-Putnam Circuit Court but lost in the general election. In 1910, he was elected to the House of Delegates, where he became chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, one of that body’s most important committee assignments.
As mayor, he donated his salary to Huntington’s parks. He died in 1935.
