Maryhill Stonehenge: A Millionaire's Memorial on the Columbia

Standing on a windswept basalt bluff above the Columbia River, across from the Oregon shore, there is a full-sized concrete replica of Stonehenge. It was not built as a curiosity or a tourist attraction. It was built as a war memorial, and the eccentric millionaire who built it poured into it a genuine and anguished grief.

His name was Sam Hill. A railroad lawyer and road-building visionary, Hill had purchased seven thousand acres of empty land along the Columbia in nineteen oh eight with dreams of founding a Quaker farming community he called Maryhill. The community never materialized, the land was too harsh, too isolated, and the settlers never came in numbers. But Hill kept building anyway, determined to leave his mark on this high desert corner of Washington.

Hill had been told, incorrectly, as it turned out, that the original Stonehenge in England had been a place of human sacrifice. That misapprehension became his metaphor. When the young men of Klickitat County began dying in the fields of France in nineteen seventeen and eighteen, Hill decided to honor them with a structure that would declare, in stone, that humanity was still being sacrificed to the god of war.

He broke ground in nineteen eighteen and dedicated the unfinished monument on July fourth of that year. Construction stretched over the following decade, and the completed Stonehenge was finally dedicated in nineteen twenty-nine. Hill died in nineteen thirty-one, buried in a solitary grave at the base of the bluff he had loved.

The names of Klickitat County's World War One dead are inscribed on a plaque at the site, making this the first World War One memorial in the United States. In twenty twenty-one, after nearly a century standing on the windy Columbia bluff, the Maryhill Stonehenge was added to the National Register of Historic Places.