He was born on January 4, 1851 in Cavendish, Windsor County, Vermont, United States, the son of Thomas Pilkington, a farmer, and his wife, Anne Cusack. He never revisited his birthplace, and his earliest recollections were of Hillsboro, Highland County, Ohio, where his parents settled while he was still an infant.
There is no information about his education.
Giving his age as fifteen, he enlisted June 5, 1863, as bugler in the 24th Independent Battery of Ohio Volunteer Light Artillery and spent the next two years guarding prisoners on Johnson's Island near Sandusky and at Camp Douglas. When his battery was mustered out in 1865, he set forth in search of the adventure that the war had denied him, wandered through the Southwest, tarried awhile in New Orleans, worked his way up the Mississippi, tried life in Chicago, and finally reached New York, which was his home thereafter. For a number of years he was on the police force.
With William Muldoon he was one of the founders of the Police Athletic Association and the Empire Athletic Association. On March 11, 1882, at the old Madison Square Garden, he won the national amateur heavyweight boxing and wrestling championships, competing in and winning both events on the same night.
He was most famous, however, as an oarsman. At a regatta at Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, in July 1882, he rowed in singles, doubles, six-oared gig, and eight-oared shell on a mile-and-one-half course, his boat winning every race. As the doubles was first declared a dead heat and had to be rowed over, this meant seven and one-half miles at racing speed. With Jack Nagle, then eighteen years old, as his partner in the national championship doubles at Pullman, August 8, 1889, he set a record that stood over forty years.
He was president of the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen from 1900 to 1920 and remained on the executive committee until his death.
When he grew too old to row he became a coach. When his fame as an athlete brought him friends and financial backing, he became a contractor. His firm did work in various parts of the country, but chiefly in New York, where "Big Jim" himself did the first actual work for the original New York subway, beginning the excavation in Bleecker Street March 26, 1900. Later he built part of the Broadway subway north of 135th Street and a section of the Catskill Aqueduct.
Failing eyesight compelled him to give up his business activities in 1923, and thereafter he seldom left his home on Sedgwick Avenue opposite the Bronx reservoir, but he continued to accompany the Columbia University crews to Poughkeepsie when they were in training. He died after a brief illness in his seventy-ninth year.
James Pilkington was one of the founders of the Police Athletic Association and the Empire Athletic Association. He was mostly famous as an oarsman in the national championship doubles, who set a record that stood over forty years. He also served the president of the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen and worked constantly to interest young men in rowing and was especially successful in encouraging the sport in the New York high schools.
Quotations: His training rules were of the simplest: "You want to eat good food and do lots of hard work and get lots of good sleep. And when you're fighting, fight; when you're walking, walk; and when you're rowing, row!"
For a number of years he was a member of the American Olympic Committee.
Endowed with a superb body and the generous instincts of a great sportsman, he excelled at boxing, wrestling, rowing, bowling, trapshooting, and all track and field sports.
His first wife, whom he married in 1877, was Constance Burke; his second wife, Kate Lysaght, and a daughter by his first marriage, survived him.
