James J. Hill and the Saint Paul Empire

The house at two hundred and forty Summit Avenue in Saint Paul is the largest private residence built in Minnesota in the nineteenth century. James J. Hill built it between eighteen eighty-nine and eighteen ninety-one, on a plot that required demolishing a full city block. It has thirty-two rooms, thirteen bathrooms, sixteen fireplaces, and a pipe organ in the main reception hall. The house is now operated by the Minnesota Historical Society as a museum.

Hill came to Saint Paul in eighteen fifty-six with almost nothing and spent the next several decades building the Great Northern Railway, the only major transcontinental railroad completed entirely without federal land grants. He financed it through a combination of careful capital management, strategic acquisitions of existing smaller lines, and a willingness to build the infrastructure that competing lines were reluctant to build. The Great Northern reached Puget Sound in Washington in eighteen ninety-three.

Hill's argument was that a railroad is only as profitable as the territory it serves. He encouraged settlement along the Great Northern's route, imported cattle from the south for northern farmers, and experimented with crop varieties that could survive shorter growing seasons. He understood his railroad as an economic development project and the towns along its route as his customers.

In nineteen one, Hill and J.P. Morgan acquired the Northern Pacific and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railways and tried to organize them under a single holding company, the Northern Securities Company. The Supreme Court, in a nineteen four ruling, found Northern Securities to be an illegal monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act and ordered its dissolution. It was one of the first major antitrust victories of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency.

Hill died in nineteen sixteen in Saint Paul, one of the wealthiest men in the United States. The Summit Avenue house remains the largest preserved Victorian mansion in the upper Midwest.