Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index This article is about James C. Penney, the person. For information on the company he founded, we invite you to write an article called JCPenney. James Cash Penney (September 16, 1875 - February 12, 1971), known to most people as J. C. Penney, was an American department store pioneer and businessman. His biggest claim to fame was founding the Penney chain of department stores in 1902. This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by fixing it. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.