Claude Washington Kress, son of John Franklin and Margaret Dodson (Connor) Kress, was born at Slatington, Pa., April 4, 1876. He attended the public school, was graduated from the Centralia, Pa., High School in 1892 And attended the Wyoming Seminary at Kingston, Pa. In 1893 he became associated with his brother Samuel H. in the mercantile business at Nanticoke, Pa. After the incorporation of S. H. Kress & Co. in 1907 he was elected vice-president of the company and in 1924 became president of the company, a chain of five, ten and twenty-five cent stores in two hundred and nineteen cities, located in twenty-eight states, with offices at 11.4 Fifth Avenue. New York City.

He was a trustee of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, to which he donated the Kress library of Business and Economics, one of the most complete collections of its kind in the United States, and he also contributed toward the erection of Kress Hall on the grounds of Warm Springs Foundation at Warm Springs, Ga. He owned a plantation in South Carolina, where narcissus bulbs were produced, formerly imported from France.

He was a Knight of the Old Order of St. George, a member of the Sons of Revolution, Pennsylvania Society of the War of 1812, Military Order of the Loyal Legion, Pennsylvania German Society, Lehigh County Historical Society, and of the Metropolitan, Union League and Manhattan Clubs of New York City, the New York Yacht Club, the Sleepy Hollow Country Club of Tarrytown, N. Y., Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club of Oyster Bay, the Clove Valley Rod and Gun Club and the Seabright Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club.

He married, October 29, 1902, Agatha Sheehan, of Atlanta, Ga., and left two daughters: Elizabeth M., wife of Raymond H. Jack, of Greenwich, Conn., and Rosalind E., wife of C. Wesley Frame, of Utica, N. Y. He died November 18, 1940, in New York City. Funeral services were held in St. Bartholomew's church, Fifty-first Street and Park Avenue, at 10:30 A. M., on November 20, 1940.