Hamlin was born in 1799 in the Finger Lakes region of western New York state, in the town of East Bloomfield in Ontario County. He was one of 11 children of Elijah Hamlin and Lydia Pope, and his family line can be traced back to Hamlin immigrants who came to America from England in colonial times. Some of John Fairchild Hamlin's cousins settled in the Buffalo, New York area and were prominent in business there. Cicero J. Hamlin was a successful industrialist and breeder of trotting horses whose home is a landmark in Buffalo today, and Cicero's great-great-grandson is actor Harry Hamlin of L.A. Law fame. Another Buffalo cousin, Emmons Hamlin, was a founding partner in the firm of Mason & Hamlin, manufacturers of fine musical instruments.
In the year 1820, when John F. Hamlin was 21 years old, he set out on a westward journey in the company of his older brother, Adolphus, his sister Olive, and her husband, William Burbank. The travelers embarked on a river journey at Olean, New York, where they picked up a keel-boat on the Allegheny River. The group followed the Allegheny for 325 miles to the Ohio, and then traveled the Ohio for 981 miles to its mouth at Cairo, Illinois. At Cairo, they continued on the Mississippi River and then to the Missouri, until they reached St. Charles, Missouri, where they had been enticed by friends to settle.
For reasons that are not recorded in history, the Hamlins and Burbanks were dissatisfied with life in St. Charles and decided to move on within a year of their arrival in Missouri. Adolphus Hamlin decided to settle in Galena, Illinois, and John F. Hamlin decided to go to Detroit to seek his fortune. The Burbanks stopped briefly in Sandusky, Ohio, where Olive Burbank decided to return home to western New York to visit her family while her husband, William, traveled on to Detroit to meet John Hamlin so that the two of them could look for homestead land north of Detroit.
John Hamlin and William Burbank decided to settle in Oakland County in what would later become the Township of Avon. John Hamlin bought land in section 22, at the corner of today's Rochester and Hamlin roads, and established a large and prosperous farm where he raised sheep. The family home that he built for his wife, Laura, and their six children, has been a landmark in the Rochester area for more than a century and a half and still stands at 1812 S. Rochester Road.
As a farmer of some means, John F. Hamlin had a keen interest in improving transportation infrastructure in an area that was basically a wilderness when he arrived. Access to city markets was important for farmers, and Oakland County had no travel routes except rivers and wagon trails. When the Clinton-Kalamazoo Canal project was launched in 1837, Hamlin signed on as a contractor to build part of the canal route. After the canal project failed a few years later, he turned his attention to railroads and was one of several Avon men who applied for legislative approval in 1844 to organized the Troy and Rochester Railroad. Unfortunately, the scheme was not economically viable and the rails were never laid; instead, Hamlin and some of the others in the railroad venture organized the Rochester and Royal Oak Plank Road Company, an improved road that was financed through tolls and followed the route of what is known today as Rochester Road.
By the time that John Fairchild Hamlin died in 1863 at the age of 64, his holdings were worth about $5.2 million in terms of today's dollars. He had a résumé of public service that included terms as supervisor, justice of the peace and collector of Avon Township, and his name was forever associated with the founding of the community.