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Purpose and benefits

For a partially-sighted, ill-educated boy from a poor family, James Jerome Hill did very well for himself. Born in 1838, he took after his hero Napoleon. He built an empire from nothing but, unlike Napoleon, managed to hold onto it. Steamboats, transport, produce, fuel—Hill was interested in any business that made money. The logical progression was the railway, and in 1878 Hill bought the bankrupt St Paul & Pacific Railroad and turned it around. By 1885 he was building ‘Hill’s Folly’, the first private transcontinental railway, completed in 1893. When Hill died in 1916, he had built and sustained a transcontinental railway as a private enterprise and almost single-handedly opened up the Pacific Northwest of the United States as a viable economic region.