James J. Hill, the "Empire Builder," was born near Rockwood, Ontario, in 1838. At age seventeen, following his father's death, he left home for Saint Paul, Minnesota Territory. There he found work in the steamboat trade along the Mississippi River.

By 1866 he had founded James J. Hill & Company, a transportation and warehouse business and by 1877 had emerged as a major coal dealer. Soon thereafter he owned a lucrative steamboat service along the Red River.

From these beginnings in transportation, Hill eventually realized his dream of building a transcontinental railroad to the Pacific Ocean.

Taking over the bankrupt Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad, which ran from Saint Paul to the Canadian border, Hill spent fifteen years constructing what would become the Great Northern Railway. Until his death, in 1916, he continued building and directing his ever-growing business empire.

The Hill story touches nearly every aspect of the national economy: transportation, agriculture, immigration and settlement, milling, mining, newspapers, lumbering, maritime trade, town building, and the rise of big business in America.

Many of the organizations Hill helped found, including the forerunner of Burlington Northern Santa Fe and U.S. Bank, are leaders in their respective industries in our own time. The histories of these great American institutions are preserved in the James J. Hill, Louis W. Hill, Reed/Hyde Family and other collections housed at the James J. Hill Library.

"Most men who have really lived have had, in some shape, their great adventure. This railway is mine."
James J. Hill on the occasion of his retirement from the Great Northern Railway, July 1912