Maryhill: Sam Hill's Improbable Dream

In nineteen oh eight, a flamboyant road-builder and peace advocate named Sam Hill bought thousands of acres of windy, treeless bluff above the Columbia River and declared he would build a model farming community there. He named it Maryhill after his daughter Mary and his wife Mary Hill. The Quaker farmers he hoped to attract never came, and a fire eventually consumed the few buildings.

But Hill pressed on. He began constructing a grand concrete mansion in nineteen fourteen and persuaded the Queen of Romania to help dedicate it. The mansion became the Maryhill Museum of Art, which opened in nineteen forty and today holds one of the finest Rodin collections in the United States.

Three miles east, Hill built a full-scale concrete replica of Stonehenge, dedicated on July fourth, nineteen eighteen, as a memorial to soldiers killed in World War One. It is described as the first monument in the United States to honor the dead of World War One.