Early Life
George Churchill Kenney was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada, on 6 August 1889, during a summer vacation taken by his parents to avoid the humidity of the Boston area. The oldest of four children of carpenter Joseph Atwood Kenney and his wife Anne Louise Kenney, née Churchill, Kenney grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brookline High School in 1907 and later that year he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he pursued a course in civil engineering. After his father left his family, Kenney quit MIT and took various jobs before becoming a surveyor for the Quebec Saguenay Railroad.
His mother died in 1913 and Kenney returned to Boston, where he took a job with Stone & Webster. In 1914 he joined the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad as a civil engineer, building a bridge in New London, Connecticut. After this was completed, he formed a partnership, the Beaver Contracting and Engineering Corporation, with a high school classmate, Gordon Glazier. The firm became involved in a number of projects, including the construction of a seawall at Winthrop, Massachusetts, and a bridge over the Squannacook River.
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