It Happened Here: Washington road pioneer Sam Hill turns mansion into an art museum
Editor's note: This column was first published June 25, 2017.
Driving along State Route 14 southwest of Goldendale, the concrete hilltop mansion is hard to miss.
Located on a bluff high above the Columbia River, the three-story Beaux Arts building was originally meant to be the home of Sam Hill, philanthropist, peace advocate, transportation pioneer and eccentric.
But a series of events converted it to the Maryhill Museum of Art, a cultural institution housing one of the nation's largest collections of Rodin sculptures.
Hill, who was born in North Carolina, came to Seattle as an executive of the Great Northern Railway and would found the Washington Good Roads Association to advocate for improved highways.
In 1905, Hill acquired 5,300 acres of land in Klickitat County near the Columbia River to set up a farming community. Hill named the site Maryhill, after both his wife and daughter, and tried to entice Quaker farmers to come to the area.
He also used the property for a 10-mile demonstration road - the first paved road in the state - to showcase the benefits of good roads and provide a test bed for road-building techniques.
But, despite being near one of the nation's great rivers, irrigation was a problem for the settlement, compounded by the wind that blows down the Columbia Gorge.
Hill's mansion was part of that community, and he planned to entertain 250 people at a time.
The mansion was designed by the Washington, D.C., architectural firm of Hornblower & Marshall, whose works included the National Museum of Natural History.
But labor shortages during World War I, plus Hill's financial setbacks and frustration with the state for not completing a highway along the Columbia, drove him to abandon the project in 1917.
But Loie Fuller, an American modern dance pioneer living in Paris, persuaded Hill to convert the half-finished mansion to an art museum. Hill and Fuller knew each other from his trips to Europe, where she was an international sensation.
Fuller's connections with France's art community - she had been a subject for sculptor Auguste Rodin, painter Henri de Tolouse-Lautrec and graphic artist Jules Cheret - helped stock it with artwork. Hill's nascent museum acquired more than 80 of Rodin's sculptures.
IndianBasketsMaryhill-YH-072416-2.jpg
Scenes of a collection of Native American baskets, bags and other handcrafted items, made by Klikitat artists, known as the Wyers Collection, is displayed at the Maryhill Museum of Art in Goldendale, Wash. on Wednesday, June 15, 2016. (SHAWN GUST/Yakima Herald-Republic)
Hill also moved his own art collection to the mansion, and another friend, Queen Marie of Romania, provided $1.5 million - $27.9 million when adjusted for inflation - worth of paintings and statues for the museum's Romanian room. She also donated the gown she wore to the coronation of Russian Czar Nicholas II.
The queen made the trip to the remote, half-finished museum for its dedication Nov. 3, 1926. Accompanied by an 85-person entourage, the queen spoke before a crowd of 2,000 on the building's east ramp.
"I knew when I set out that morning to consecrate that queer freak of a building that no one would understand why; I knew it was empty and in nowise ready to house objects for a museum," the queen wrote in her diary. "I knew there were scoffers about me, even hostilities, but a spirit of understanding was strong in me that day and I managed by my own personality, by my words, by my spirit, to move all the hearts beating there this morning. ... I knew that a dream had been built into this house, a dream beyond the everyday comprehension of the everyday man."
It would take almost 14 years for the museum to become a reality. Hill died in 1931, and his estate was tied up in litigation. It finally opened on May 13, 1940, Hill's birthday.
In addition to the Rodin collection and Queen Marie's donations, the museum also includes a large collection of Native American art, a collection of small mannequins displaying post-World War II French fashion and a collection of chess sets from around the world.
It Happened Here is a weekly history column by Yakima Herald-Republic reporter Donald W. Meyers. Reach him at dmeyers@yakimaherald.com or 509-577-7748. Sources for this week's column include The Maryhill Museum of Art, historylink.org, The Inflation Calculator by Morgan Friedman and the archives of the Yakima Herald-Republic.
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