A young family is breathing new life into an historic Huntington home that recently turned 100 years old.
By James E. Casto
HQ 105 | SPRING 2019
Honeysuckle Hill, an elegant 18-room house, has been part of Huntington’s history for 100 years. Perched on a wooded knoll overlooking McCoy Road, the house offers a bird’s-eye view of Ritter Park’s famed Rose Garden.
The three-story house is situated on two acres of well-landscaped grounds, with pink and white dogwood, Norway spruce and shade trees. A private drive winds its way to the top of the knoll, where visitors are welcomed by an impressive stone staircase to the front entry.
Enter the home’s breathtaking foyer with its striking staircase and you can’t help but be reminded of Tara, the grand mansion in Gone with the Wind. To your left is a large living room with a handsome fireplace and windows that offer a panoramic view of the beautiful grounds. Across the foyer is a formal dining room where meals can be enjoyed by candlelight or the gleam of the antique crystal chandelier.
Take the stairs to the second floor, stand on the balcony and you have a commanding view of the large home. Continue exploring and you can admire the family room, den, sunroom, breakfast room and half-dozen bedrooms, each with its own bath.
The history of Honeysuckle Hill began in 1918 when Dr. and Mrs. James Irwin Miller commissioned Robert Day and Sidney Logan Day, a father-and-son architectural team, to design their new house. Dr. Miller was the son of George Frederick Miller, one of young Huntington’s most prominent businessmen.
Born in Georgia in 1853, Robert Day worked as a construction engineer for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. He settled in Huntington and started a successful concrete construction business, later adding architectural work to his business portfolio. Some of his work included the City Hall in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, the Miller & Ritter Building in Huntington and the west wing of the Cabell County Courthouse. He retired in 1924 and died four years later.
His son Sidney, born in Huntington in 1887, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in architecture. He joined his father’s business and after his father’s retirement continued working as an architect. His work included the Foster Memorial Home, the Beverly Hills and Highlawn Presbyterian churches, the Hite-Saunders and Emmons schools and the Huntington Publishing Co. building.
For the Millers, the father-and-son team designed a Normandy Tudor-style mansion. In the 1930s, Paul Walker Long and his wife, Jennie Eloise Campbell Long, purchased the house and commissioned Sidney Day to dust off the original blueprints of the house and redesign it as a classic Georgian structure.
In Day’s redesign, the east and west wings remained as originally built. The main entrance, roofline and two gables were removed, and a central dormer was created over the entrance with a fanlight window resting under the bracketed portico above. The original rusticated stone of the first floor was painted white, and new shutters were installed on the second-floor windows.
Paul Walker Long was the son of Col. Joseph Harvey Long, the legendary publisher of Huntington’s newspapers.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1863, Col. Long (the title was strictly honorary) moved to Wheeling in 1881. There he and a partner founded the Wheeling News. In 1893, he moved to Huntington and embarked on building the city’s newspapers into a force to be reckoned with. Active in civic affairs, he was president of the Huntington Chamber of Commerce from 1936 to 1941 and in that post played a key role in the construction of the Huntington floodwall. Col. Long was 95 years old when he died in 1958. He died at Honeysuckle Hill, where he had made his home with his son and daughter-in-law since being stricken ill in 1955.
The younger Long held various posts with his father’s newspaper company and, like his father, was active in civic affairs. He was a long-time president of the Tri-State Airport Authority and a major supporter in the airport’s development. Significantly, he convinced his father to establish WSAZ, the state’s first television station.
Paul Walker Long and his wife were lifelong Democrats, so it’s not surprising that the couple entertained John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy at Honeysuckle Hill when the future president was campaigning in West Virginia in 1960.
When Paul Walker Long died in 1961, his wife — in the words of a close friend — “refused to be a widow.” A former concert singer, she long had been active in the arts but she became even more so after her husband’s death. For 16 years, she organized and chaired the West Virginia auditions for the Metropolitan Opera. She was the first president of the West Virginia chapter of the Friends of the Kennedy Center and was a trustee of the National Symphony in Washington. She loved to entertain, and an invitation to come to Honeysuckle Hill for one of Mrs. Long’s regular Sunday afternoon sherry parties was a coveted invite. Mrs. Long died in 1981.
Over the years, Honeysuckle Hill has housed a series of families. Today it’s home to Drs. Tim and Jennie Yoost, husband and wife physicians, and their three young children.
Tim Yoost, originally from northeast Ohio, now practices urology at Three Rivers Medical Center in Louisa, Kentucky. Jennie Yoost, a native of Frankfort, Kentucky, practices at Marshall Health’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Huntington.
Both the Yoosts attended Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. That’s where they met. They both then went on to graduate from the University of Louisville School of Medicine and completed their respective residencies at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, South Carolina.
When Tim finished his residency, he took what he thought at the time would be a temporary job at Three Rivers in Louisa, while Jennie was finishing up a fellowship in pediatric and adolescent gynecology in Louisville. Tim would stay in Louisa for a couple of days and then drive back to Louisville.
“We made that work for a couple of years,” Jennie said. “Then Tim said he really liked the community and working at Three Rivers and wanted to stay on there. So, he thought we should check out Huntington as a place to live.”
In 2013, Realtor Jill Nelson showed them Honeysuckle Hill and they knew it was the home for them. The Yoosts wanted a place to host family and friends and to be near downtown Huntington.
“I loved the house from the moment I turned into the driveway,” Nelson said. “You can feel its history when you walk into its grand foyer — its gorgeous woodwork, high ceilings, wainscoting and other rich architectural details make it unique. I knew it was going to require a special family that would maintain the house and appreciate its value. I feel privileged to have worked with the Yoosts and place such a beautiful family in the house. I’m now honored to call them friends.”
In turn, the Yoosts praised Nelson as “a wonderful person.”
“She actually invited us to her church (First United Methodist), and now it’s our church, too,” Tim said.
Today, the couple is happy to call Honeysuckle Hill home. “This house and the Huntington community are both great places to raise a family,” Tim said.
“We’ve always liked old houses,” Jennie said. “We had a really old house when we lived in Louisville. We appreciate their character and history.”
Tim and Jennie said they love living at Honeysuckle Hill and having Ritter Park in their front yard.
“We have people stop us a lot and tell us they have fond memories of visiting the house in the past,” said Jennie. “Tim likes to run on the track in the park, and our girls love looking down at the many weddings held in the Rose Garden. It’s just a great place to live.”
