James Powell Kernochan was an American businessman and clubman who was prominent in New York society during the Gilded Age.
Early life
Kernochan was born on October 22, 1831 in New York City in a house at 8th Street and Second Avenue. He was the son of Joseph Kernochan and Margaret Eliza Kernochan. His siblings included William Seymour Kernochan, and Elizabeth Powell Kernochan Garr, John Adams Kernochan, Henry Parish Kernochan, Ann Adams Kernochan, Frank Edward Kernochan, and J. Frederic Kernochan. His father, who was born in Scotland and came to America in 1790 as a baby, was a dry goods merchant and banker that was a founder of the University Club of New York. His paternal grandparents were William and Esther Kernochan, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who had a farm in Orange County, and his maternal grandparents were William Seymour and Eliza Seymour, an English family who lived in Brooklyn.
Career
Along with Albon Man, a New York attorney, William E. Sawyer, an electrical engineer, Hugh McCulloch, and others, Kernochan was an initial investor-partner in Electro-Dynamic Light Company, a lighting and electrical distribution company organized in 1878. Electro-Dynamic Light was the first company organized specifically to manufacture and sell incandescent electric light bulbs. Mainly, his business career consisted of managing his wife's and his own estate. At the time of his death, was a trustee of the Lorillard, Spencer, and Marshall estates, as well as a director of the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company.
James Lorillard Kernochan, who married Eloise Stevenson, the daughter of Vernon King Stevenson, the first president of the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad, in 1891. After his death, she remarried to Alexander Butler Duncan.
Kernochan died on March 6, 1897 at his residence, 824 Fifth Avenue, in New York City from a concussion of the brain and cerebral meningitis which resulted from a fall after he had been struck by the shaft of a wagon at Fifth Avenue and 41st Street. He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. His widow died in 1917.
Descendants
Through his daughter Katherine, he was the grandfather of Herbert Claiborne Pell, Jr., a U.S. Representative from New York, U.S. Minister to Portugal, U.S. Minister to Hungary, and an instigator and member of the United Nations War Crimes Commission. Herbert was the father of Claiborne de Borda Pell, a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island who served for 36 years from 1961 until 1997.
