By Meg van Huygen, Curbed Seattle; July 19, 2019
They called him the Empire Builder.
James Jerome Hill was born in 1838 in a log house about 50 miles west of what we now call Toronto, coincidentally right about the time that the barely existent railroad industry kicked off its very first developments in the then-untouched wilderness of British Canada. Hill and the Canadian railroad system grew up together, and by the time Hill reached adulthood, the industry was well established but ripe for expansion. It would be the way he’d make his great fortune—and how Seattle’s grand transportation depot King Street Station would come to exist.