Chris Kenney was born in Jacksonville in 1883, a descendent of William T鈥檝ault, a Jacksonville pioneer who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. In 1966, Kenney wrote his memoirs, looking back on the town and its residents.
Kenney was a teenage prankster. He admits that he and his friends should have been severely punished on several occasions, such as when they entered a barber shop with a skeleton key on Halloween and coaxed a neighbor鈥檚 cow inside. The next morning the irate barber found his shop a mess created by a very unhappy cow.
As a young man working in a hardware store, Kenney married Nan Lyden, whose father owned the Lyden House hotel and restaurant in Jacksonville. Kenney knew about everyone in town, including a former owner of the Jacksonville Inn who liked to sunbathe in the nude and pioneer sheriff William Bybee, who reportedly washed his false teeth in the horse trough outside a saloon. He knew where people dumped illegal liquor during prohibition, who greased the railroad tracks, and who surreptitiously picked their neighbors鈥� cherries.
Kenney died in 1971, leaving memoirs donated to the Southern Oregon Historical Society.
Sources: Kenney, Chris. "Memoirs of Chris Kenney." The Table Rock Sentinel, vol. 5, no. 6, June 1985, pp. 7-16.
