A new account of a 19th-century financier from Larne who helped fund American railroad expansion will be presented at Larne Museum on Saturday 13 June.

Dr Barry Henderson, whose doctoral research at Queen’s University Belfast uncovered the story, will speak from 1pm to 2.30pm as part of the council’s America 250 programme marking the upcoming United States semiquincentennial.

James McHenry was born in Larne in 1817 and emigrated to the United States as an infant. He later returned across the Atlantic, establishing a shipping business in Liverpool in the 1840s before shifting his focus to American railroad development. He became a financier in Victorian London, channelling European capital into United States infrastructure projects.

Dr Henderson’s work connects McHenry to contemporaries such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller, and to European courts through ties with Napoleon III and the Spanish House of Bourbon. His reputation later suffered amid the controversies of America’s Gilded Age.

Mayor of Mid and East Antrim, Alderman Thomas Gordon, said the event demonstrates how Larne is linked to global themes of American development and the 19th-century Atlantic economy.

The talk aims to draw audiences interested in local heritage, Ulster-Scots history, and transatlantic links.