Sam Hill's Museum

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Sam Hill's Museum
'The loneliest museum in the world.'

By J. Kingston Pierce


	Sam Hill established his museum on a bluff above the Columbia River.

When Washington State's Maryhill Museum of Art opened to the public in 1940, Time magazine declared it to be "the loneliest museum in the world." The description still fits. Perched on a remote, wind-scoured bluff overlooking the broad Columbia River Gorge, surrounded by gardens and lawns where peacocks fan their tails in the sun, Maryhill looks like a princely palace that some blundering builder put up in the wrong place.

Who in the Sam Hill was responsible for erecting this edifice and then filling it with everything from Rodin sculptures to European royal regalia? None other than Sam Hill himself.

Hill was an eccentric Seattle millionaire, Harvard-educated lawyer, road-builder and friend to some of the most powerful figures of his era. In 1907 he purchased 7,000 acres of scrubland on the north side of the Columbia, about 100 miles east of Portland, Oregon, and just south of the Washington hamlet of Golden-dale. "We have found the Garden of Eden," he proclaimed and insisted that his apparently desolate property lay at an agriculturally ideal juncture between rainy western Washington and the state's sunnier eastern half. There he began to lay out a farming community for enterprising Quakers like himself, as well as an imposing house of his own. Aware that his father-in-law, Great Northern Railway tycoon James J. Hill, planned to lay new tracks along the Columbia's north shore, connecting Portland with Spokane, Sam believed his otherwise isolated settlement would have all the commercial connections it needed to thrive. The name he chose for his town, Maryhill, honored both his wife and his schizophrenic daughter.

Maryhill looks like a princely palace that some blundering builder put up in the wrong place.

He hadn't reckoned, though, on Quakers' spurning his invitation to live in the town. Two groups of Quakers came to look over the site, and two groups walked away, unimpressed. All that's left of Hill's planned community are a couple of foundations and an inoperative concrete fountain that stands where the main public square was to have been.

But the three-story concrete mansion Hill began building in 1914 has endured. Designed by the Hornblower & Marshall firm of Washington, D.C., it bears a striking resemblance to Marie Antoinette's beloved Petit Trianon at Versailles. It also looks much like another Hornblower & Marshall edifice Hill built as his primary residence on Seattle's Capitol Hill in 1909. However, this riverside "ranch house," as Hill always called it, wasn't to be just a second home; it was to be a showplace.

After Hill's wife returned to her parents in 1903, unable to adapt to the rhythms and climate of the Pacific Northwest, Hill spent more and more time socializing. His friends included some of the most important characters in the region's early history, such as Oregon lumber baron Simon Benson, Portland publisher Henry L. Pittock and Seattle master engineer Reginald H. Thomson. Maryhill was to be the perfect place to entertain them, with space to seat as many as 250 people at formal dinners and with ramps on either end of the mansion so cars could be driven up to double-wide doors to drop off distinguished guests.

But with the failure of his Quaker colony, Hill's passion for the whole Maryhill project cooled, and he got involved in campaigns to build a road down the southern bank of the Columbia (today's historic Columbia River Highway) and to extend the state highway systems of both Oregon and Washington. An inveterate pacifist, Hill also threw himself (and his money) into healing Europe's bloody World War I wounds. His concern for that continent's plight and his sorrow for the Americans who'd died defending its future led Hill to construct what is said to have been the first monument honoring World War I dead: a full-scale concrete replica of England's Neolithic Stonehenge. It still stands on the original Maryhill townsite, three miles east of the museum.

A trio of extraordinary women restored Hill's interest in Maryhill and established the museum of art that is one of his proudest legacies. The first was Loie Fuller, who had left her childhood home in Chicago to become an exotic French dancer—a star of the famous Folies-Bergères—and a friend to such notables as actress Sarah Bernhardt, writer Alexandre Dumas and sculptor Auguste Rodin. Fuller usually gets credit for the idea to turn Hill's castle on the Columbia into a world-class art museum. She was certainly instrumental in convincing Hill to purchase some of the working models from which Rodin sculpted The Thinker and other of his most memorable pieces. More than 50 Rodin sculptures now form part of the permanent Maryhill Museum collection.

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Seattleite J. Kingston Pierce is the author of San Francisco, You're History! (Sasquatch Books, 1995) and America's Historic Trails with Tom Bodett (KQED Books, 1997).