Samuel Hill - Biography

Biography

Sam Hill was born into a Quaker family in Deep River, North Carolina. Displaced by the American Civil War, he grew up after the war in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After graduating from Haverford College in 1878 and Harvard University in 1879, he returned to Minneapolis, where he practiced law. A number of successful lawsuits against the Great Northern Railway attracted the attention of the railway's general manager James J. Hill, who hired him to represent the railway. They also became family in 1888, when Sam Hill married J. J. Hill's eldest daughter Mary.

For over a decade, Hill played an important role in his father-in-law's enterprises, both at the Great Northern and as president of the Minneapolis Trust Company. However, around 1900 they had some type of falling out, the nature and degree of which is not clear. Indeed, it is not even clear whether the falling out was primarily over business matters, over some possible early symptoms of the manic tendencies Sam would show late in life, or over Sam and Mary's apparently increasingly fractious marriage. In any event, the break was not a sharp one: the two men continued a friendly correspondence in business matters.

After a 1901 journey across Russia on the then not-quite-completed Trans-Siberian Railway, Hill settled in 1902 in Seattle, Washington, where he had major interests in the Seattle Gas and Electric Company, which was focused mainly in the coal gas business. Hill had already announced his intention to settle in Seattle in December 1900. His wife Mary did not take well to the Northwest, and moved back to Minneapolis with their two children without him after six months. Hill stayed in Seattle, and embarked on a number of ventures in the Northwest.

Much of Hill's attention was devoted to advocating good roads in Washington and Oregon. He also advocated the use of convict labor to build roads. He created the Washington State Good Roads Association in September 1899, which persuaded the Washington State Legislature to create a state highway department in 1905. Hill persuaded the University of Washington to establish the United States' first chair in Highway engineering in 1907. After failing to convince Washington State to build a highway on the north bank of the Columbia River, he convinced Oregon officials to build the scenic Columbia River Highway, which linked coastal Astoria, Oregon and The Dalles, Oregon. He was also a strong advocate of better roads for Japan and of Japanese-American friendship, which earned him the Third Class Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1922.

Starting in 1907, Hill bought land in Klickitat County, Washington near the Columbia River, envisioning a new community in the Inland Empire. He bought up most of what had been a small settlement known as "Columbia" or "Columbus" and named the parcel Maryhill, after his wife and his daughter Mary (who never actually lived there). His original plan was to develop it as a community of Quaker farmers, but he was the only Quaker to ever reside there. The land proved useful for his transportation advocacy. Between 1909 and 1913 he built, at his own $100,000 expense, the first macadam asphalt-paved road in the Pacific Northwest, experimenting over its 10-mile (16 km) length with seven different paving techniques. Part of this road (now called the Maryhill Loops Road) is still open to pedestrians and bicyclists. As part of Hill's advocacy for good roads, Oregon governor Oswald West and the Oregon Legislative Assembly visited Maryhill in 1913. Hill also began to build a mansion at Maryhill, but the project was not completed in his lifetime, due to a combination of financial reversals and his frustration at the State of Washington's failure to build a road on the north bank of the Columbia or to otherwise make the area readily accessible. He eventually decided—at the urging of his friend Loie Fuller—to convert the building into an art museum. The museum was dedicated by Queen Marie of Romania in 1926, but did not open to the public until 1940, nine years after Hill's death.

Hill constructed two notable monuments. The replica of Stonehenge, at Maryhill, commemorates the dead of World War I, while the Peace Arch, where today's Interstate 5 highway crosses the U.S.–Canada border, celebrates peaceful relations and the open border between the two nations.

Hill died in 1931 from natural causes, diagnosed as "an abscess of the lesser peritoneal cavity which had ruptured into the stomach, producing 'fatal terminal hemorrhages'." At the time he became acutely ill with the disease, he was on his way to address the Oregon state legislature on the subject of the need to regulate trucks in order to protect the condition of highways, and was hoping to follow this with a similar address to the Washington legislature. Hill chose a ledge below his Stonehenge replica for his burial site, and designed his own monument; but that monument did not last, and has since been replaced.

The Sam Hill Memorial Bridge, which carries U.S. Route 97 across the Columbia River near Maryhill, is named for him. There is also a plaque in his honor at Chanticleer Point.