Robert Kirkland Kernighan

[1] Born at Rushdale Farm, Rockton, Canada West, he apprenticed as a journalist on the Hamilton Spectator staff.

It was the opinion of Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald that if Canada ever went to war the soldiers would march to battle singing Kernighan's poem "The Men of the Northern Zone".

In an article reviewing personalities from Hamilton history, Kernighan was praised as a "...poet and humourist with a rare gift of sympathetic portrayal of rural Canadian life.

Kernighan's lecture was attended by notable local personalities who were described in the Amusement Record as the "Fourth Estate".

The reviewer concluded: "The lecture was a masterpiece of native eloquence, humour and pathos, and the only fault found was that it was too short."