William Kent

William Kent (March 29, 1864 – March 13, 1928) was an American politician, conservationist and philanthropist from Marin County, California. He served as a U.S. Representative from Northern California between 1911 and 1917, and was instrumental in the creation of Muir Woods National Monument. Early life Kent was born in Chicago, Illinois, on March 29, 1864. His parents, Adaline Elizabeth Dutton and meatpacking magnate Albert Emmett Kent (A.E. Kent) moved the family to Marin County in California in 1871, where his father had purchased 800 acres of valley land that would later become the town Kentfield, California. He graduated from Yale University in 1887, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. Following graduation from Yale, Kent returned to Chicago and took up his father's real estate and livestock businesses, where he had inherited, among other interests, a tenement block adjacent to the Hull House settlement. After he was attacked as a slumlord in an 1894 speech by a Hull House resident, Kent donated the tenements to Hull House, which would later raze the property to build one of the first public playgrounds in the United States.