Sam Hill's Stonehenge

 by Fred Delkin

 Sam Hill was quite a guy.  His family was instrumental in bringing cross-country rail to the Pacific Northwest and Sam moved out here as a young lad with them late in the 19th century.  As he reached adulthood, Hill was consumed by a vision of roads to complement the rails that connected our land… roads that would smooth and speed the passage of that newfangled means of transport, the automobile.

At the start of the 20th century, what Northwest roads existed were a muddy, almost non-negotiable-by-horseless-carriage mess whenever it rained.  Undoubtedly irked by one too many mired-down attempts to get to the train station, Sam Hill organized the Washington State Good Roads Association in 1899 and in 1907 established a chair of highway engineering, the first in the nation, at the University of Washington.  That same year, Hill bought 6,000 acres of land overlooking the Columbia (on the Washington side, just upriver from The Dalles) and began planning the grand mansion that today serves as the Maryhill Museum. 

In 1913, before mansion construction started, Hill utilized the site to put into practice the good roads theories he had subsidized.  No less than seven types of experimental road surfacing were employed to build Loops Road, a 3.6 mile route that snakes through the Klickitat Hills just north of Maryhill and was the first paved road built in the Pacific Northwest.  The project utilized liquid asphalt shipped from the La Brea tar pits in what is now downtown (if there is such a thing) Los Angeles.

Maryhill Museum is a worthy destination that draws a year-round attendance for its artistic and cultural exhibits that include road related memorabilia.  The Loops Road is open daily for bicyclists and pedestrians and available for groups wanting to stage an event.  Visit it and experience another facet of ‘what in the Sam Hill’ this visionary was all about.