Carlos Albert Kenaston was born in Sherbrooke, Canada, April 12, 1837 to David and Sarah Kenaston. Four years later his family removed to Oberlin; and in 1852 he began study in the Preparatory Department of the College, and graduated A.B. in 1861. In 1864 he received from the College the Master’s Degree.

March 6, 1862, Mr. Kenaston married Lucy Kellogg Fairchild, a daughter of the late President James H. Fairchild, and also a graduate of the College with the class of ’61; and in the fall of that year they went to Lansing, Mich., where Mr. Kenaston was for two years instructor in the Agricultural College. He was principal of the Decatur, Ohio, academy in 1865-66; professor in Pittsburg, Pa., high school, 1866-72; professor in Ripon College, 1872-81; civil engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, 1881-84; and railroad engineer in Wisconsin in 1884-85. During the period of his professorship at Howard, he went to Paris as special commissioner of the Interior Department on the subject of irrigation in France and Algiers; also to Labrador as geographer of the Bryant Expedition; and he published an account of its work in the Century Magazine. In 1892 he gave up his Washington professorship, and in August of that year was sent to Alaska by the Treasury Department in the interest of the preservation of the salmon fisheries. In October 1894, he went to Salt Lake City as professor in Salt Lake College and remained in this position until July 1897, when he returned to Oberlin, where he was engaged mainly in business up to the time of his last illness.

He suffered a stroke of apoplexy, from which his recovery was only partial, then failed rapidly during the last year and died at his home in Oberlin, November 19, 1905. Mrs. Kenaston and an adopted daughter, Mrs. Belle Goodall, survived him.