Sam Hill was a rich, happy-go-lucky eccentric millionaire and philanderer, which combined oddly along with his Quakerism. James J. Hill employed Sam Hill into the Northern Pacific Railroad authorized division in 1886. Two years later, Sam married his boss’s daughter, Mary Francis Hill (making her Mary Francis Hill Hill). The couple had a daughter, Mary Mendenhall Hill, in 1889 and a son, James, in 1893. Sam grew to become president or director of a half-dozen of J.J. Hill’s subordinate railroads.
That very same 12 months, Hill began making a farming neighborhood on 7,000 acres on the north aspect of the Columbia River, the place he started constructing a mansion that might later grow to be the Maryhill Museum of Artwork. Hill’s biographer, John Tuhy, wrote that Hill could have used the anticipated go to of Belgian Prince Albert, who supposedly would attend the 1909 Alaska-Yukon Exposition, to justify his mansion to the general public. The prince didn’t present. Nonetheless, Hill met with the American Congress of Roadbuilders in Alaska.
Hill usually admitted good roads have been his “religion.” He started constructing experimental roads on his property in about 1909. When Washington Gov. Marion Might thwarted Hill’s effort to create a roadway north of the Columbia River, he turned south to Oregon. After displaying his experimental roads to Oregon Gov. Oswald West and legislators, he started planning the Columbia River Freeway.
Devoted in 1916 however constructed between 1913 and 1922, the freeway ran 75 miles between Troutdale and The Dalles in Oregon. Now referred to as the Historic Columbia River Freeway, it’s the oldest scenic freeway within the nation and has impressed different such roadways. It’s a Nationwide Historic Landmark as we speak, though components have been destroyed when Interstate 84 was constructed.
Hill fathered three kids by mistresses. The third and final of the ladies was Mona Bell, 33 years his junior. They met in 1910. Eighteen years later, Hill had a 22-room home constructed for her on 35 acres. That 12 months, she gave delivery to Samuel B. Hill. Bell’s organized marriage to Hill’s cousin Edgar legitimatized his offspring.
Tuhy calls the sandy-colored Hill mansion surrounded by garden and bushes “Castle Nowhere” as a result of it’s removed from anyplace. The fort and different initiatives accent Hill’s peculiar character. After the 1918 Armistice, he set the primary stone for a Stonehenge-like monument to native males misplaced in World Struggle I, finishing it in 1930. In 1920, he began the development of a Peace Monument in Blaine.
It’s rumored Sam Hill is the supply of the phrase, “What in the Sam Hill?” Hill joked he was certainly the supply, maybe referring to his eccentric initiatives. Etymologists differ, relationship the saying to the 1830s when “Sam Hill” changed the phrase “devil” within the idiom.
