Old Photograph Knocknalling House Scotland

Old photograph of Knocknalling House located near Dalry in North Ayrshire, Scotland. John Kennedy was born in 1769 in Knocknalling. In 1784 he moved to Chowbent, near Leigh in Lancashire, England, to be apprenticed to William Cannan, the son of a neighbour of the Kennedys. His training covered the manufacture of textile machinery including carding engines, jennies, and water frames. On the completion of his apprenticeship in 1791, he moved to Manchester and went into a long-lasting partnership with James McConnel, a nephew and former apprentice of Cannan, to manufacture textile machinery and undertake cotton spinning. Benjamin and William Sandford provided the financial backing. Kennedy was a skilled and inventive engineer and is credited with devising a crucial improvement to fine-spinning machinery, called double speed, which enabled much finer thread to be manufactured. He died in 1855 at Ardwick Hall, Manchester, and was buried at the nearby Rusholme Road cemetery. He was succeeded by several children, including barrister John L. Kennedy, who immigrated in 1874 to the United States and settled and farmed in LaSalle County, Illinois before attending Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois in 1879 and then graduating from the law department of the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1882. He passed the bar and briefly set up practice in Omaha, Nebraska being elected as a Republican to the Fifty-ninth United States Congress. He served from March 4, 1905 to March 3, 1907, unsuccessfully running for re-election in 1906. He was the Federal fuel administrator for Nebraska from October 1917 to March 1919. He was also the president of the United States National Bank from 1920 to 1925 and president of the Omaha Chamber of Commerce in 1924 and 1925. He retired in January 1933 and moved to Pacific Palisades, California, where he died August 30, 1946. He was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California.



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