In May, 1914, a small group of friends of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and admirers of James J. Hill took the initiative in founding a Professorship of Transportation in his honor and to bear his name. The group consisted of Robert Bacon. George F. Baker, Howard Elliott, Arthur Curtis James, Thomas W. Lamont, Robert T. Lincoln, and J. P. Morgan. Seventy-four persons contributed an aggregate of $125,000, and the endowment of the professorship was announced by President Lowell at the 1915 Commencement exercises with the statement that “the Chair marks an epoch in the life of the School, and by its recognition of transportation as a permanent object of systematic instruction, in the life of the nation also.”