Search Results for: james hill

Happy Birthday, James J. Hill

Today is the 175th anniversary of the birth of James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern Railway and one of the great entrepreneurs of the late 19th century. As a railfan, the Antiplanner likes Hill because the Great Northern has always been my favorite railroad. It is only a coincidence that Hill’s politics were pretty similar to mine.


Hill in 1915.

Wikipedia describes Hill as a Bourbon Democrat, meaning a classical liberal who supported free trade and opposed government subsidies and legislative efforts to protect corporations from competition. As I detail in an article that should soon be published by the Great Northern Railway Historical Society, Hill also believed that the federal government should stay out of conservation issues as it would likely do more harm than good.

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James J. Hill’s Legacy

For parts I, II, and III, see James J. Hill, Entrepreneur, James J. Hill, Empire Builder, and James J. Hill, Conservationist.

In 1912, at the age of 74, James J. Hill retired as chairman of the board of the Great Northern Railway. “Most men who have really lived have had, in some shape, their great adventure,” he wrote in a letter to his friends and employees. “This railway is mine.”

James and son Louis Hill at a Minnesota State Fair. Hill often offered prizes for the best livestock and produce shown at state fairs.

Hill and his wife Mary had nine children including three sons. James was nominally a Presbyterian but Mary was Catholic, and when their eldest son, James N., married a divorced woman, she banished him from the household. That left the second son, Louis, as the heir apparent. (James N. moved to Texas and earned millions investing in the Texas Oil Company.)

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James J. Hill, Conservationist

For parts I and II, see James J. Hill, Entrepreneur and James J. Hill, Empire Builder.

James J. Hill was acutely aware that most of the products shipped on the Great Northern Railway were agricultural, and he worried that traditional farm practices were degrading the soil. “I know that in the first instance my great interest in the agricultural growth of the Northwest was purely selfish,” he said in a speech. “If the farmer was not prosperous, we were poor, and I know what it is to be poor.”

Hill lecturing farmers about soil conservation at the Stearns County (MN) Fair in 1914.

In order to promote what we would now call sustainable farming, Hill encouraged crop rotation and raising of livestock whose manure could fertilize the soil. Between 1884 and 1910, he purchased thousands of prize bulls, hogs, and rams in Europe and gave them to farmers on the condition that they make them available to their neighbors for breeding purposes.

His soil theories were not always correct, but he hired expert agronomists to start a Great Northern Extension Service to train farmers with the latest techniques. Among other things, for demonstration purposes, his extension agents actually paid farmers to follow their recommended practices to show how much greater yields they could attain.

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James J. Hill, Empire Builder

For part I, see James J. Hill, Entrepreneur

By 1900, James J. Hill was recognized as a miracle man who would soon be known far and wide as “the Empire Builder.” He helped J.P. Morgan reorganize the Northern Pacific, something he could have done without Morgan’s help except for a Minnesota anti-monopoly law forbidding one railroad from taking over a competitor. He then negotiated the purchase of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, which connected the GN and NP with Chicago and also extended to Denver, Kansas City, and St. Louis. A fleet of steamships extended his reach west to Tokyo, south to San Francisco, and east to Buffalo.

Probably the most famous photo of Hill, circa 1902. Could that be a Thoreau pencil in his hand?

In 1901, Hill had the fight of his life when Wall Street financier Edward Harriman, who had reorganized the bankrupt Union Pacific and purchased the Southern Pacific, tried to take control of the Northern Pacific. Harriman’s real objective was the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, which would provide the UP and SP with access to Chicago. However, he had been unwilling to pay the $200 per share demanded by the company’s president, Charles Perkins. When Hill paid Perkins’ price, Harriman tried to get a share by taking over the NP.

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James J. Hill, Entrepreneur

In a misguided attempt to find a climate that would help him recover from the tuberculosis that would kill him the following year, Henry David Thoreau visited St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1861. It would not be surprising if, while in St. Paul, Henry encountered an earnest young man working in the shipping business.

James J. Hill in 1864.

Born in 1838 in what was then called Upper Canada about 50 miles from Toronto, James Hill (he himself added the middle name, Jerome) “took a notion to go” to St. Paul in 1857. Though his schooling had ended at age 14 when his father died, he quickly advanced in the shipping business as a clerk, bookkeeper, and manager.

Due to the waterfalls of St. Anthony, St. Paul was the head of navigation on the Mississippi River, so freight had to be transfered between steamboats and wagons and, later, trains. In 1866, Hill built a warehouse on the Mississippi that greatly eased such transfers. By 1872, he was a partner to Norman Kittson–his elder by 24 years–in a steamboat monopoly on the upper Mississippi and also had a local monopoly in the anthracite coal business.

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The Hill Family Trusts

This is a continuation of my posts about the Willamette Valley & Cascade Mountain Wagon Road.

Taking a page from his father’s example of the Minnesota mineral lands, Louis Hill turned his timber lands in Oregon into a trust. Louis, however, wasn’t as generous as his father. Instead of making Great Northern Railway stockholders the beneficiaries of the trust, he created the trust to provide a continuous income for his family. Actually, he made six trusts: one for each of his children, one for his wife, and one for himself. Each had a one-sixth undivided ownership of the timber lands. While the trusts were created in 1917, the lands earned no income for another two decades.


Congress’ policy of granting only every other square mile of land creates a distinctive checkerboard pattern. The dark green on this Google map is the Willamette National Forest while most of the light green squares are Hill trust forest lands. Highway 20 closely follows the route of the Santiam wagon road. Click here to see the same map in satellite view showing clearcuts on the Hill forest lands.

Shortly after Louis Hill acquired those timber lands, a forestry professor at UC Berkeley quit his job to start a forestry consulting firm in Portland. Dave Mason was a prophet of sustained yield forestry, which he described as “limiting the average annual cut to the production capacity” of a forest. This was in contrast to most timber land owners of the time, who generally bought land, cut the timber, and then let the land go for taxes. Continue reading

49. Romance of the Rails

Shortly before the Cato Institute published Gridlock, Knopf published a similar book called Traffic by a writer named Tom Vanderbilt. The two didn’t cover exactly the same ground: Traffic focused on the physics of congestion while Gridlock focused on the institutional issues around transportation. But I noticed that Traffic received far more reviews and mentions in major newspapers and magazines than Gridlock.

American Nightmare, my next book, got even less attention. Part of the problem, I was told, was that book reviewers didn’t take Cato seriously as a publisher. I wanted to change that, so I asked Cato’s book editor, John Samples, and Cato’s marketing director, Bob Garber, how I should write a book that would sell better.

“Tell stories,” they said. People like stories. Gridlock and American Nightmare both delved deep into history, the latter going back a thousand years to look at housing and property rights. But the stories these books told were impersonal. Continue reading

What Happened to the Land?

Long before their title to the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Wagon Road land grant was secure, the farmers and livestock owners who founded the company put the road and land up for sale. In 1871, they agreed to sell the company to someone named H.K.W. Clarke for just over $160,000 (about $4 million in today’s money), of which Clarke paid $20,000 and the rest was paid by someone named Alexander Weill.

This 36-page booklet was used to try to sell lands from the WV&CM land grant. Click image to download a 26.5-MB PDF of the booklet, which is from the Harvard Library.

At the time, the company had received title to just 107,893 acres, or about one-eighth of the final grant, but since the governor had certified the entire road by 1871, both sides were confident that the company would get the rest. While $160,000 for 860,000 acres of land is only 18-1/2¢ an acre, it is a pretty good return for the company owners who probably spent less than $30,000 building and maintaining the road and got most or all of it back in tolls. Continue reading

The Willamette Valley & Cascade Wagon Road

Most central Oregon residents are familiar with the Santiam Wagon Road, which parallels U.S. highway 20 up the Cascade Mountains from Sweet Home to Santiam Pass and then down the other side to Sisters. Parts of it are still open as a gravel road that is frequently used by recreationists and the occasional log truck. Other parts have been downgraded to a trail that is less frequently hiked. I’ve both hiked and driven much of the route.

Much of today’s post is based on this book by Cleon Clark, who wrote it after retiring from a career with the Deschutes, Ochoco, and Malheur national forests, all of which were crossed by the wagon road. This book was published by the Deschutes County Historical Society in 1987 and is not copyrighted, so I am making it available for download here. Click image to download the 22.5-MB PDF of this 122-page book with two large maps.

What most residents don’t know is that the Santiam Wagon Road is only part of what was supposed to be a road from Albany, in the Willamette Valley, to the Snake River on the eastern boundary of the state. Even fewer realize that this road was part of one of the biggest land scams in the state, even bigger than the Oregon & California Railroad scandal in the sense that the owners of the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Wagon Road company got away with their scam, while the O&C Railroad did not. Continue reading

Railroad Land Grants: Boon or Boondoggle?

I wrote several posts for my other blog, Streamliner Memories, that are relevant here as well. Recent news stories have asked why projects like the California high-speed rail and Honolulu rail line are so expensive. The answer is that the politicians who support these projects don’t care about the cost because someone else will have to pay it. Or rather they do care but for them the cost is the benefit — the more they spend, the more might be turned into contributions to their future political campaigns from grateful contractors.

This 1939 report from the Department of the Interior lists 105 railroad, wagon road, canal, and river improvement land grants made by Congress in the 19th century and how many acres various transportation companies ended up receiving for those grants. A few of the grants, including the massive Northern Pacific grant, were still open with the grantees hoping to get several million more acres. Click image to download a 4.7-MB PDF of the report.

We saw an early example of this in the First Transcontinental Railroad and later railroads supported by large federal land grants. Railroads weren’t the only transportation projects supported by federal land grants: there were also canals, wagon roads, and river improvements. As it happens, I live near one of the wagon road projects that turned out to be a giant scam in which a few people got more than 860,000 acres of federal land for doing little more than driving a wagon across the state of Oregon. Continue reading