To say Samuel Hill lived a fascinating life is almost an understatement.  A frenetic Quaker, Sam’s life is magnificently on display online where you can find his excellent biography Sam Hill, The Prince of Castle Nowhere written by John Tuhy.  Among his many interests was his participation in the Good Roads movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  Hill was instrumental in the development of both the Pacific Highway, a route linking the three Coastal States to each other from Canada to Mexico.  He pushed for the development of a true coastal highway paralleling the Pacific Highway – today’s US 101 – as well.  But Hill is best known for his role in the development of the Columbia River Gorge Highway, now over a hundred years old.

OH, RENAISSANCE – THE MAN

Hill’s interests were all over the board.  He was a true Renaissance man graduating from both Haverford College near Philadelphia and Harvard a year later – 1879.  Hill began his career as a lawyer in Minneapolis.  After a couple of successful court wins against James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway, James Hill took on the young man who soon expanded into roles far beyond the courtroom becoming president or director in several of the elder Hill’s companies.

Sam married the eldest daughter, Mary, of his sponsor in 1888 which certainly did not hurt his career in the Great Northern world.  They would have two children, Mary and James, but the marriage was not one of Samuel’s greatest achievements nor his children.

20TH CENTURY MOVER TO THE NORTHWEST

By the end of the 19^th century, Sam Hill was beginning to back out of the Great Northern world moving to Seattle to head the Seattle Gas and Electric Company.  Mary moved out to Seattle for six months before returning to Minneapolis for good.

Throughout the aughts, Hill built up a fortune through investments; fighting with locals in Seattle in local gas wars; formulating a plan for a Quaker farming town on the north side of the Columbia River just above Celilo Falls; pushing hard for “Good Roads”; with time left over for building homes in western Massachusetts, Seattle and constantly tripping abroad to Europe or Japan.

iN SEARCH OF ‘GOOD ROADS’

As part of his plan for a town in the eastern Columbia Gorge area, he hired Samuel Lancaster away from the federal Department of Agriculture where he worked as a road building expert.  Taking Lancaster along for a trip to Europe to a good roads conference in Paris, Hill and Lancaster toured over many of the road systems of the Old World.

“It was while we were journeying up the Rhine,” said Mr. Lancaster, “that Mr. Hill said to me, ‘We’ll have something like that someday up and down the Columbia.’  I was looking at an old castle.  I thought he meant that, but his mind was on the dry masonry walls of vineyard terraces, and he was dreaming of such walls along a great highway in the Columbia gorge.” – The Hood River Glacier 9 February 1922.

Interestingly enough, Bingen is a town in Germany located on the confluence of Nahe River and the Rhine and Bingen is also on the Columbia River across from Hood River. They are not pronounced the same, however 🤦‍♂️😃.

Another road which impressed Sam Hill and Lancaster was the Axenstrasse in Switzerland with its route along the east shore of the Vierwaldstätter See – across from the field at Rütli of William Tell fame – with its many tunnels and viaducts, principles Lancaster would use in the future.

MARYHILL LOOPS ROAD

In 1909, Hill had Lancaster design a road leading up from his proposed town site in the Gorge to the north and the Klickitat County seat in Goldendale.  Utilizing hairpin turns – 12 with an additional 13 curves – Lancaster built a road descending 850 feet over several miles at a grade of 5%.  The road, finished in 1913, became the first macadam asphalt-paved road built in the Pacific Northwest.  Actually, there seven different paving methods were demonstrated along the road.  Maryhill Loops Road served for many years as the main road between Goldendale and the Columbia River.  Only in 1948 were the Loops superseded by a newer US route 97 running up the west side of the gulley opposite the Loops Road.

ONE ROAD LEADS TO ANOTHER

Hill’s efforts led the State to include a project that could have led to a Columbia Gorge highway on the north side of the river. Problems with costs and projects in other parts of the State convinced Washington governor Marion Hay to shut down the use of convict labor for road construction.  Hill, who had supported Hay in his earlier election, also played a role in Hay’s subsequent defeat as governor in 1914.  A paved north bank highway would come about in the 1930’s. 

So, in 1913 – Hill had by this time been living in Portland trying to resuscitate a local telephone company – Sam Hill brought Oregon governor Oswald West and the entire Oregon legislature over to Maryhill at his own expense to observe the roads he had created.  This helped smooth the way for Hill and his friends in Oregon to create the Columbia River Gorge Highway.

THE LOOPS TODAY

Closed in the 1960’s by the Washington Department of Transportation, much of the road was refurbished in 1998 reserved for special events for vehicles, whether they be classic cars or long board skateboards, but also open most days to hikers and bikers.  The road ends at a turnaround after 3.6 miles.  There is a memorial drinking fountain created from a glacial erratic stone dating to 1912.  Silence reigns but for the windmills rotating on the hillcrests above. This is the heart of wind country in the Gorge. The non-refurbished part of the road continues higher to reach a closed gate just before meeting up with US 97 at Davies Pass – 1595 feet elevation.

An interesting sidenote, many of the stone masonry projects on that highway came from a group of Italian stonemasons who Sam Hill learned about when he built a vacation home in western Massachusetts.  He brought several out to Seattle to work on his home there at his expense.  Many of those men continued working with Hill in the Columbia Gorge.

QUAKER TOWNSITE

Backtracking to 1907, Sam Hill bought large areas of ground around the small settlement of Columbus, also known as Columbia.  He hoped to build a town he hoped to become an important center of the Inland Northwest.  His original intention was to attract Quakers to take up settlement here, but Sam was the only Quaker to stay.  The original name for the townsite was Maryland, but the Postal Service complained of possible mix-ups with the State and Hill settled for Maryhill, named for both his wife and daughter.

“RAIN AND SUNSHINE”

In the era before dams stretched across the Columbia River, water was very difficult to come by in the deserts east of the Cascade mountains.  Hill had a dam built on the ravine below which the Loops Road ascended to the east.  The dam material was too porous, however, and quickly filled with silt from the hills above.  Potential landowners were promised a share of the water company which quickly amounted to little.

An illustrated advertising brochure drawn up included Hill’s coined slogan “Where the rain and sunshine meet.”  The problem with the slogan? Hill thought up the slogan when looking for possible land near White Salmon, Washington. White Salmon in the east shoulder of the Cascades features 20 inches more of rain per year.

FITS AND STARTS

A land office, weather station, stone store, Quaker meeting house and hotel – the St James – all eventually went up along with housing for men working on the nearby roads and a bungalow for his daughter and her nursing companion who occasionally came out in the summers before 1916.  Fire hydrants and a sewer line were put in – three hydrants still remain. However, with no water in the reservoir, the hydrants and a fountain became all non-starters.

By 1913, the town plans quieted down. Hill had already spent $600,000 and seen little in the way of return.  Even so, the following year, he began work on what, at first, would be his great house.  By this time, Hill owned over 7,000 acres. Describing the land, Hill said “5,000 acres are rock and 2,000 acres are the best land that ever lay out of doors for raising fruits and vegetables”.

Fires over the years have destroyed all but a couple of the buildings in the town of Maryhill.  The farms along the river and little community of Maryhill-Columbus persists. Water is available 400 feet lower. The hilltop townsite remains barren but for the Stonehenge Memorial Sam had built on the former site of the hotel.

NEW WORLD STONEHENGE

On 4 July 1918, a new monument dedicated to the folly of man and those from Klickitat County who paid the price arose.  The idea came to Sam on a 1915 visit to Stonehenge out on Salisbury Downs in England with a small party hosted by Lord Earl Kitchener, British Secretary of State for War during the early part of World War I.  “Here the ancients 4,000 years ago offered bloody sacrifices to their heathen gods of war” Kitchener discoursed.  Sam, duly impressed remarking, “4,000 years.  We have come that far.  And still, we are sacrificing the blood of our youth to the gods of war.”

Archaeologists doubt whether sacrifices were ever made at the original, but those ideas were not known at the time.  Hill’s Stonehenge was laid out so the summer solstice would strike the tall heel stone outside the double circle of great stones and cast its shadow on the central altar.  An outer circle of 30 stones represented the days of the month. Inside, an inner circle of 40 smaller stones stand, unlike the English original.

To find your way around the site, you can find no better guidebook than Curious Gorge by Scott Cook who does a fantastic job of uncovering many of the hidden wonders to be discovered in the Columbia River Gorge.

Sam hill

Placed on the original site of the St James Hotel – moved closer to the Stone Store and renamed the Meadowlark Inn – it would take another twelve years until the monument reached completion, re-dedicated on Memorial Day 1929 because of a shortage in funds available to Sam. 

Samuel Hill’s cremated remains are entombed below the monument. A short path leads down to what is actually a second tomb, the first not built to last.

the sacrifices

Fourteen men from Klickitat County are honored with plaques – one man, Charles Auer, winning posthumously a Navy Cross – equivalent of a Distinguished Service Cross – as a marine at Belleau Wood near Chateau Thierry.

Second Lieutenant Louis Leidl is memorialized here at Stonehenge. There is also a cenotaph at the IOOF Cemetery in his hometown of Goldendale, twelve miles to the north. Leidl is buried in France at the Meuse-Argonne ABMC Cemetery. James Duncan signed up with the US Cavalry in 1916. He died in the summer of 1917 while still in the US at 19 and is buried in his hometown at Trout Lake.

Of the others memorialized here – Dewey V. Bromley and Harry Gotfriedson lie at Oise-Aisne ABMC Cemetery. John W. Cheshier died in the sinking of the Tuscania of the coast of Scotland in February 1918. He is buried in Arlington. Edward Lindblad died in the St Miheil Offensive and rests at the St Miheil ABMC Cemetery. Henry O. Piendl died in France, but his body was repatriated and buried in the nearby Mabton Cemetery. William O. Clary died at Fort Lawton in Seattle early in 1919, probably from complications of the Spanish flu.

In non-Covid times there is a memorial ceremony on site for each of the men on the anniversary of their deaths. You can read much more about the men remembered on the walls here.

THE FARMHOUSE

THE DREAM

The most memorable monument to Samuel Hill lies a few miles to the west of his hoped-for town, the Maryhill Museum.  Hill described the home serving as “a good, comfortable and substantial farmhouse.”  He also said, “I expect this house to be here for a thousand years after I am gone.” thoughts not quite in line with the idea of a mere farmhouse.  Dining room was to be able to seat 250 people with long ramps leading from the west and east into the main floor.  A garage below featured an electric elevator to bring guests from below as well.  Library, reception room with a third floor set up as eight suites with bathrooms for prominent guests.

The design began in 1914 by the same firm which planned his Seattle home – the two are very similar.  Thick concrete made up the structure used reinforced with steel girders with no wood present.  Wired for electricity, it would be twenty more years before electric current was available.  In the meantime, gas heated and lit the house with five miles of plumbing used in the walls.

REALITY SETS IN

Money problems and a host of other activities – the Columbia Gorge Highway, his telephone company problems in Portland and trips to Europe in 1916 – slowed construction to a snail’s pace.  Other activities took his attentions away from the house after the war.  Persuaded in 1917 to dedicate the home as a museum for French art, Hill still declined to finish the home throughout the 1920’s upset with the State of Washington at failing to build a north bank highway which would give visitors easier access.

The house was dedicated on a visit in November 1926 by Queen Marie of Romania.  The building was far from finish at the time of dedication.  It was still far from finished at the time of Hill’s death in 1931.  The queen came in by train for the day, a quick speech and off again.  Her procession drove west to Portland over the Columbia River Highway.  She would spend time at Same’s home in Seattle before moving north to Canada.

In her diary, Marie wrote of the house, “… “a strange uncouth cement building erected by the just as strange Samuel Hill.”

TODAY

The museum eventually finished and opened 13 May 1940 – Hill’s birthday.  San Francisco socialite and heiress Alma de Bretteville Spreckles played a major role in pushing the plans for the museum forward after Hill’s death. 

Time magazine called it “the world’s most isolated art museum” when it opened on May 13, 1940. Its nickname is Castle Nowhere. “Eclectic” is the word used often to describe the collections housed by the museum.  Such a museum perfectly personifies the nature of a man like Samuel Hill.