Sam Hill's Stonehenge: The Wrong Sacrifice, the Right Memorial

Sam Hill was wrong about Stonehenge. He believed the original, on Salisbury Plain in England, was a place of human sacrifice, where priests had killed people on the altar stone in ancient religious ceremonies. Archaeologists now understand Stonehenge as primarily an astronomical monument and burial site, not an altar for killing. Hill's premise was mistaken.

His memorial is not.

Hill was a Quaker, a railroad lawyer, a relentless promoter of the Columbia River Gorge, and a man who believed that the soldiers of Klickitat County had been, in his words, "sacrificed to the god of war." He began construction in nineteen eighteen, before the armistice ending the First World War had been signed. He chose a basalt bluff above the Columbia at Maryhill, Washington, where the river makes a wide bend and you can see for miles in every direction. He commissioned a full-scale concrete replica of Stonehenge, built to the dimensions of the original, and dedicated it as a memorial to every man from Klickitat County who had died in the war.

Queen Marie of Romania, Hill's close friend, visited the bluff in nineteen twenty-six, when she dedicated his nearby Maryhill Museum, a Romanian queen standing above the Columbia River at the opening of an American eccentric's monument to art.

Maryhill Stonehenge remains the first World War One memorial built in the United States. The original dedication included names. The monument was later updated to include Klickitat County's dead from the Second World War as well. It sits on a bluff above the river with no fee, no interpretive center, and no crowds. You can walk the stones alone. The wind comes off the Columbia and the Columbia runs below. Hill is buried on the hillside nearby, looking at what he built.