- Hill, James J. (1838–1916) (MNopedia)
James J. Hill fit the nickname “empire builder.” He assembled a rail network—the Great Northern (1878), the Northern Pacific (1896), and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy (1901)—that stretched from Duluth to Seattle across the north, and from Chicago south to St. Louis and then west to Denver. He was one of the most successful railroad magnates of his time.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
Genesis 1:24 KJV
- James J. Hill (Wikipedia)
James Jerome Hill (September 16, 1838 – May 29, 1916) was an American railway entrepreneur. He was the chief executive officer of a family of lines headed by the Great Northern Railway, which served a substantial area of the Upper Midwest, the northern Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest. Because of the size of this region of the United States and the economic dominance exerted by the Hill lines, Hill became known during his lifetime as “The Empire Builder”, and died in 1916 with a fortune of about $63 million, or about $1.3 to 1.7 billion today. His former home, James J. Hill House, is now a museum in Saint Paul, Minnesota.