USA / China: John Murray Forbes (1813 – 1898) was an American railroad magnate, merchant, philanthropist and abolitionist. He was president of both the Michigan Central railroad and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in the 1850s.

John Murray Forbes (1813 – 1898) was born in Bordeaux, France. His parents were Ralph Bennett Forbes and wife Margaret Perkins, niece of Thomas Handasyd Perkins, founder of a Boston Brahmin family merchant dynasty involved in the China trade. The Forbes family settled in Milton, Massachusetts, where his father was an energetic but unsuccessful businessman who died when John was only six.

Forbes attended school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then at Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1823-28. He was one of three brothers sent by their uncle to Canton (now Guangzhou), China, and achieved some financial success during a short time spent trading in Canton. However, unlike his brother Robert Bennet Forbes who devoted himself to the China trade, Forbes returned to Boston and became an early railroad investor and landowner.

Although Forbes' is best known as a railroad magnate, much of his fortune was based in the opium trade to China. It is said that his opium millions financed the career of author Ralph Waldo Emerson, who married Forbes's daughter, and bankrolled the establishment of the Bell Telephone Company, whose first president was William Hathaway Forbes, father of Ruth Forbes Paine.

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