HILL, JAMES J. American railway capitalist, was born near Guelph (Ont.), Canada, Sept. 16, 1838, and attended Rockwood (Ont.) academy, a Quaker institution. In 1856 he settled in St. Paul (Minn.). He became a clerk in the office of a firm of river steamboat agents and shippers, and later was agent for a line of river packets; he established (about 187o) transportation lines on the Mississippi and on the Red river (of the North). He effected a traffic arrangement between the St. Paul Pacific railroad and his steamboat lines; and when the rail way failed in 1873 for $27,000,000, Hill interested Sir Donald A. Smith (Lord Strathcona), George Stephen (Lord Mount Stephen), and other Canadian capitalists, in the road and in the wheat country of the Red river valley; he reorganized the road as the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba, and in 1883 he became its president. He was president of the Great Northern railway from 1893 until April 1907, when he became chairman of its board of directors, serving in that capacity until 1912. The Hill interests obtained control not only of the Great Northern system, but of the Northern Pacific and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, and proposed the construction of another northern line to the Pacific coast. Hill was the president of the Northern Securities Co., which in 1904 was declared by the U.S. Supreme Court to be in conflict with the Sherman Anti-Trust law. Feeling that the farmers and millers of the northwest needed a large financial institution near at hand, in 1913 he secured control of the First and Second National banks of St. Paul, and merged them. He wrote Highways of Progress (191o).