Great Northern Railway Company

Great Northern Railway Company, American railroad founded by James J. Hill in 1890. It developed out of a struggling Minnesota railroad, the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (SP&P), which Hill and three associates purchased in 1878.

Hill was a Minnesota coal and freight merchant who knew the north country well and believed he could build the decaying SP&P into a great railroad. He extended it north to the Canadian border to link up with a Canadian line to Winnipeg, and then westward through the Dakotas and Montana, reaching Great Falls in 1887 and the Pacific coast at Everett, Wash., in 1893. Hill induced thousands of homesteaders, mostly from Scandinavia, to settle along his tracks as he built them westward. In 1890 the system’s name was changed to the Great Northern.

To supply cargo for his railroad, Hill developed export markets in the Orient for American cotton, flour, and metals. Eastbound, the road carried lumber from the Pacific Northwest to the midwestern prairies. Together with J.P. Morgan of the Northern Pacific Railway Company (q.v.), Hill bought control of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company (q.v.) in 1901. This gave both railroads a link to Chicago, St. Louis, and the cotton-hauling railroads of the South.

In the same year, Hill set up the Northern Securities Company, a holding company to control the three railroads, with himself as president. The U.S. Supreme Court declared it in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1904 and ordered the company dissolved. The Burlington continued under control of the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific, however, and in 1970 the three were merged as the Burlington Northern, Inc. (see Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation).