Born in Wayne County in 1871, Floyd S. Chapman first joined his father and brother in the grocery business and later opened his own grocery store in Huntington.
Then, as he often told the story, he woke up one morning and asked himself: “Who wants to be a grocer when there’s so much good newspaper work lying around loose?”
His first newspaper experience was as a reporter with the Advertiser. Before long he was the paper’s city editor. After seven years at the Advertiser, he became part-owner and editor of the Huntington Herald. Later, he sold that interest and started his own paper, the Huntington Dispatch. Five years later, the two papers merged to become The Herald-Dispatch.
Along the way, he also had time to open one of Huntington’s first movie houses, the Lyric, established in a converted skating rink on 4th Avenue between 8th and 9th streets.
In the 1912 election, he was the top vote-getting commissioner and so became mayor. He took office just in time to preside over a town inundated by the 1913 flood. Ohio River flooding was far from unusual, but the 1913 flood was the worst ever – until 1937.
Chapman would go on to serve two other non-consecutive terms as mayor.
In 1923, during his second term, the city limits were expanded to include Westmoreland in Wayne County.
