Sam Hill's Stonehenge on the Columbia

On a bluff high above the Columbia River, overlooking one of the most dramatic landscapes in the Pacific Northwest, stands a full-scale replica of Stonehenge built from reinforced concrete. It is not a folly or a theme park attraction. It is a war memorial, and it was the first monument in the United States dedicated to the American dead of the First World War.

The man behind it was Sam Hill, a road builder, entrepreneur, and committed pacifist who was a Quaker by faith. Hill had been misinformed that the original Stonehenge in England had served as a sacrificial site in ancient times, and he seized on that misunderstanding as a metaphor. If ancient priests had once sacrificed human lives on those stones, he argued, then humanity was still sacrificing its young men on the altar of war. Hill wanted the monument to be a statement: that the deaths of Klickitat County's soldiers in the Great War were a tragedy, not a triumph.

On July fourth of nineteen eighteen, with the war still raging in France, Hill dedicated the altar stone at the center of the structure. The plaque reads: to the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country. Fourteen names are engraved on the memorial, men who served in the Army, the Marine Corps, and the Navy, including infantry, engineers, and coastal artillery. Construction continued for more than a decade, and the full structure was completed in nineteen twenty-nine.

Hill engineered his Stonehenge as a road builder would: reinforced concrete poured into wooden forms lined with crumpled tin to give a rough texture, built the way Hill imagined the Druids might have built it had they possessed twentieth-century technology.

The memorial was added to the National Register of Historic Places in twenty twenty-one. It remains one of the strangest and most moving roadside monuments in America.