Five years after the death of railroad magnate James J. Hill, his dream of erecting a public library in the heart of downtown St. Paul became a reality set in Tennessee marble and Minnesota sandstone. The James J. Hill Reference Library opened onto Rice Park in 1921, drawing job-seekers and entrepreneurs to its Roman pillars and Reading Room throughout the difficult years of the Great Depression and beyond.
On the cusp of its centennial anniversary, the dream is ending, or at least taking a long pause. Library officials announced Tuesday that the reference library — now better known as a wedding venue and nonprofit business center — will close to the public on July 3.
Executive director Tamara Prato said in a written statement that she and one staff member will stay on as the center evaluates “all options related to the future of the institution and its historic building in downtown St. Paul.” Existing wedding reservations will be honored through the end of the year.
The nonprofit had struggled to find its financial footing in the modern era, even changing its name to the James J. Hill Center in 2013 to represent the services provided beyond reference books. Promoting itself as a showcase for startup businesses, it launched networking events and featured youth “Idea Academy” camps, marketing talks and meetings of the startup network 1 Million Cups St. Paul.
“As a privately funded nonprofit, our ability to provide these services to the public for free is not sustainable,” said Prato, in her statement. “We continue to be challenged to develop a financial model that can deliver the original intent while being fiscally responsible for the ongoing operating costs of the organization and necessary capital investments in the historic structure.”
Patrick Moran, president of the Hill Center’s board, referred all questions to Prato, who has run the center since April 2016.
Prato, in an interview, said with funding from the Minnesota Historical Society, the center recently completed a historic structure report that gave board members pause. Without releasing actual numbers, she called the projected cost of maintenance and repairs “significant for the building for the long term.”
The nonprofit, she said, relies heavily on endowment funding, as well as a small amount of fundraising and grants.
Prato noted the Hill Center partners with organizations such as the Small Business Administration, LegalCORPS and Greater MSP to provide services to entrepreneurs and small-business owners. They also facilitate the 10-week startup incubator Co.Starters at the Hill, which will graduate its third class of entrepreneurs on July 2. A Co.Starters cohort that was scheduled to begin in September has been put on hold.
“None of the programs we currently are providing existed three years ago,” Prato said. “The funding model just takes time.”
Moran, the board president, will lead the process to help determine the future of the organization, she said.
The center is not affiliated with the Minnesota Historical Society’s James J. Hill House on Summit Avenue or the J.J. Hill Montessori School on Selby Avenue, other than that Hill — who is alternately praised as a visionary industrialist and philanthropist or vilified as a “robber baron” — remains a ubiquitous presence in St. Paul. Raised in a rugged Canadian frontier town, Hill arrived in the capital city as a teenager in the 1850s and, with no formal schooling past the age of 14, built a national dynasty on the rails — the largest railroad empire in the country.
THE EMPIRE BUILDER
Hill completed the Great Northern transcontinental railroad line — a precursor to the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe lines — from St. Paul to Seattle in 1893, opening up access to oceanic trade with Asian markets. Library lore has it that instead of a public celebration for the achievement, he asked St. Paul leaders to focus their energy instead on investing in a library.
In 1912, Hill publicly committed “a minimum of $750,000” of his own money to build a reference library in downtown St. Paul. Cash gifts were listed each week in the St. Paul Pioneer Press next to the names of wealthy benefactors. (An overlapping effort funded the opening of the general purpose Central Library next door in 1917.)
Hill chose not to collect volumes on medicine, law, genealogy or popular fiction, preferring instead books on history, science, economics, art, music and geography.
The reference library, built in an Italian Renaissance style with a Beaux Arts facade crafted from Tennessee marble, welcomed its first patrons in 1921, five years after Hill’s death. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, it became a gathering place for hundreds of out-of-work state residents seeking job retraining. By 1940, the library — which had opened with 10,000 volumes — offered 142,000 books and drew 61,000 people.
The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
After partnering with colleges and universities on international studies programs in the 1950s, the James J. Hill Reference Library refocused itself in 1976 on the state’s business growth and economic development. It obtained Hill’s voluminous and influential papers in 1982 and the even larger collection of his son, railroad executive Louis Warren Hill, in 1986, both of which have provided historians with key insights into the early growth of industrial America.
The library debuted its first entrepreneurial venture — the fee-based HillSearch custom research service — in 1993, adding it to a growing list of research tools that included CD-ROMs and electronic databases.
ONLINE COMPETITION
Many of those same research tools are now available online or through other public library systems, challenging the library’s efforts to provide a unique or cutting-edge resource. In addition to hosting weddings and “Shark Tank”-style startup contests, the library launched a series of global music concerts in 2015.
“Over the past three years the James J. Hill Center has significantly increased its programming and community impact while actively supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Minnesota,” said Prato, in her written statement.
“Considering these challenges, there is a need to evaluate the sustainability of our mission in concert with our building,” she said. “As such, the Hill’s board and executive director are carefully examining options and having conversations with key leaders who might offer insight and counsel as to the future of the organization.”
Hill left behind a massive fortune when he died, but no will. His descendants — which include six daughters and three sons — went on to found Glacier National Park, fund construction of Visitation Convent in Mendota Heights and revive the St. Paul Winter Carnival in 1916. Three foundations sprang from his legacy: the Grotto Foundation, the Northwest Area Foundation and the Jerome Foundation, all of which continue to this day.
