Christopher Chenery

Christopher Chenery, the son of Ida and James Chenery, was born in Richmond and raised in Ashland, Virginia. He had three brothers, William Ludlow Chenery, who became editor of Collier's, Dr. Alan Chenery, and Charles Morris Chenery. (A fourth brother died young.) Chenery's sister was Blanche Chenery Perrin, a writer of novels and children's books centered on horse racing, such as Born To Race. As a child, Chenery visited relatives at the farm in Doswell, Virginia known as The Meadow where he learned to ride. This was the farm where he later founded Meadow Stable and where Secretariat was born.

He studied at Randolph-Macon College and Washington and Lee University, graduating in 1909 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. He began his engineering career in Virginia before moving to projects in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, but his career was interrupted with service in the United States Army Corps of Engineers during World War I. During the war, he commanded training facilities at Camp Humphries, Virginia. Afterward, he was a government consultant on engineering and construction.

On January 18, 1917, he married Helen Clementina Bates, who died in November 1967. They had two daughters, Helen Bates "Penny" Tweedy and Margaret Carmichael, and one son, Hollis Burnley Chenery, an economist at the World Bank.

Chenery formed the Federal Water Service Corporation in 1926, later the Federal Water and Gas Corporation. Chenery was involved in two cases before the Supreme Court of the United States (both entitled Securities and Exchange Commission v. Chenery Corp., one decided in 1943 and one in 1947), and that are considered landmark cases of United States administrative law.

In 1936, he became the chairman of the board of another utility, Southern Natural Gas later Sonat, eventually purchased by the El Paso Corp. In 1954 he formed The Offshore Company, a Southern Natural Gas Company subsidiary conducting deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He was chairman of the board and chief executive officer until 1965.