James Powell Kernochan

James Powell Kernochan (October 22, 1831 – March 6, 1897) His father, who was born in Scotland and came to America in 1790 as a baby, was a dry goods merchant and banker and 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 (née Powell) 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. Conveniently, 400 was the number of people that could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom.

He was a governor of the Metropolitan Club, the Union Club of the City of New York, the Tuxedo Club, and the Rockaway Hunting Club. Following Ward McAllister's death, served as one of the leads of the Patriarchs Ball alongside William Watts Sherman, George G. Haven, Charles Lanier, and William C. Whitney. They owned a residence in New York City at 824 Fifth Avenue and a home in Newport, Rhode Island.

Katherine Lorillard "Kitty" Kernochan (1858–1949), who married Herbert Claiborne Pell (1853–1926), one of the founders of Tuxedo Park, New York. James Lorillard Kernochan (1867–1903), who married Eloise Stevenson (1872–1948), 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. His widow died in 1917.

Descendants Through his daughter Katherine, he was the grandfather of Herbert Claiborne Pell Jr. (1884–1961), Herbert was the father of Claiborne de Borda Pell (1918–2009), a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island who served for 36 years from 1961 until 1997.