C. K. G. Billings
American industrialist and equestrian (1861-1937)
Cornelius Kingsley Garrison Billings (September 17, 1861 – May 6, 1937) was an American industrialist tycoon, philanthropist, art collector, and a noted horseman and horse breeder. Billings invested much of his time and money promoting the sport of trotting, also known as "harness racing" or "matinee racing".
Life and career
Billings was born in Saratoga, New York, on September 17, 1861, the son of Albert M. Billings, a resident of Vermont, and Augusta S. Billings née Farnsworth. He was raised in Chicago, Illinois, from the age of three, attended schools in Chicago, and then Racine College in Racine, Wisconsin. When he finished college at 17 in 1879, he joined the Peoples Gas Light and Coke Company – of which his father was a principal investor and president – beginning as a laborer. After becoming the firm's president in 1887, he brought about the mergers from 1895 to 1910 of 12 gas companies into Peoples Gas. He became chairman of the board of the company in 1901, a position he held until 1911.
In 1885, Billings married Blanche E. MacLeish (1863-1937), whose father, Andrew MacLeish, was one of the founders of the Chicago department store Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company. In 1894, they had a son, Albert Merritt Billings, who died in 1926; Billings endowed the Billings Memorial Hospital in Chicago in his memory. They also had a daughter, Blanche Pauline “Gretchen” (1886-1968), who married William Halstead Van der Poel in 1910.
“C. K. G. Billings” enters the record as american industrialist and equestrian (1861-1937). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Billings, American and industrialist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5006141. VIAF identifies the subject as 9778398. The Library of Congress control number is nr2002004500. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1861, 1937, 1879 and 1887.
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This entry incorporates text from “C. K. G. Billings” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.