James J. Hill

James Jerome Hill was an American railway entrepreneur. He was the chief executive officer of a family of lines headed by the Great Northern Railway, which served a substantial area of the Upper Midwest, the northern Great Plains and the Pacific Northwest. Because of the size of this region of the United States and the economic dominance exerted by the Hill lines, Hill became known during his lifetime as "The Empire Builder", and died in 1916 with a fortune of about $63 million about $1.3 to 1.7 billion today. His former home, James J. Hill House, is now a museum in Saint Paul, Minnesota.