He graduated in 1857 from Trinity College Dublin and became a civil engineer, working for some years as a surveyor for railway purposes.

"[5] In 1872, Hamilton emigrated to Canada where he became a journalist and an editor, working in Bracebridge, Ontario at E.F. Stephenson's Free Grant Gazette, and as a Government Immigration Agent.

He passes over the surveying by Henry Bayfield[7] to the Free Grants Act of 1868, notes the efforts to organize as a county in Ontario, and the $2000 bonus and tax deferral given to Beardmore Brothers tannery to locate in Bracebridge.

Hamilton, the scholar and newspaperman, with his pet snowy owl and birch bark accessories, holed up with his books above the Free Grant Gazette.

After having lost his editorship in 1885, he started his own Market Guide, "a four-page, pink paper tabloid, ... in which he sold sufficient advertising to eke out a starved existence.