Sam Hill Country

No Quakers came. Hill offered his colony's land to Quaker farmers from 1909, then widened the offer and even tried leases, and by about 1915 he stopped selling and turned the ground over to cattle. The roads were the part that worked. In 1913 he brought Oregon's legislators here to ride the loops, and they went home and built the Columbia River Highway, designed by Samuel Lancaster, who had laid these. When Hill died in 1931 his ashes were placed in a crypt below the Stonehenge memorial. Three plates are missing from the board's foot.

What the plaque says

Sam Hill Country In 1908 Samuel Hill (1857-1931) bought 7,000 acres on these slopes. He planned a Quaker farming colony, surveyed a 34-block tounsite and built a church, hotel, store, offices, garage and shops. His engineers built ten miles of experimental roads; as Washington's first rural paved roads they proved Hill's zeal as a promoter of highways. Three miles to the west he began construction of an old-world chateau, which in 1940 was completed as the Maryhill Museum of Art. In 1918-1929 Hill constructed the Stonehenge replica, America's first World War I memorial, on the original site of his hotel. Fire eventually destroyed the buildings of the never-occupied townsite, leaving only Stonehenge, roads and stonework, and the Museum as monuments to the vision and energy of this public-spirited American.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Celilo Village — 8.4 mi
  The village that stayed on the bluff above the drowned falls, rebuilt half a century late by the government that flooded them, where the salmon season still opens each April.
• Temani Pesh-wa and She Who Watches — 15 mi
  Rock images cut from a canyon wall weeks before The Dalles Dam drowned it, kept in storage for half a century, and brought back to the river by the treaty tribes.

More markers nearby

• Deschutes River Crossing — 6.6 mi
• Celilo Falls — 7.6 mi
• Ancient Indian Fishing Grounds — 8.1 mi
• A Culture Lives On — 14 mi