Samuel Hill
Samuel Hill (13 May 1857 – 26 February 1931),[1] was an American businessman, lawyer, railroad executive, and advocate of good roads.
Although his promotion of paved modern roads is possibly his greatest legacy, he is now best remembered for building the Stonehenge replica in Maryhill, Washington.
[8] For over a decade, Hill played an important role in his father-in-law's business endeavors, both at the Great Northern and as president of the Minneapolis Trust Company.
[18] Hill made at least fifty separate trips to Europe in the course of his lifetime[19] and visited Japan nine times between 1897 and 1922.
He had this information added to high-quality custom-made globes of German manufacture repeatedly commissioned from 1902–1914, which Hill gave as gifts.
[29] Taken as a whole, his attempt to create the Maryhill community was one of Hill's least successful investments: He spent at least US$600,000[30] that never paid back in any significant measure.
[29] A more modest, but successful undertaking was a golf course and a large, simple restaurant at Semiahmoo, just north of the U.S.–Canada border and Hill's Peace Arch.
[40] In recognition of his influence, a plaque honoring him was placed along Historic Columbia River Highway, at Chanticleer Point, Oregon.
[42] Sam Hill 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.
[43] Sam Hill built two notable monuments and an art museum, and purchased the private Minneapolis Athenaeum and donated it to the city.
[45][46] Hill 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.
[48] Hill served for a time as vice president of the Minneapolis Athenaeum, a private subscription library, and recruited George Putnam as its librarian in 1884.
He even bought an estate at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Sam hoped he and Mary would occasionally stay together, but their relationship continued to grow cold.
Hill lived the life of a wealthy man, but never impressed his father's biographer as having made any particular mark on the world.
One of these children is identified by Hill biographer John E. Tuhy, writing in 1983, only as a "son who lives in British Columbia".
Elizabeth was legitimized by her mother's marriage of convenience to a German-Swiss man named Henry Ehrens who soon returned permanently to Europe.
[58] Sam Hill's last child was Sam Bettle Hill (born August 1928, died 1997)[59] son by Mona Bell, a flamboyant bareback rider turned reporter; who allegedly appeared in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show.
[60] The year before their child was born, Sam bought Bell 35 acres (140,000 m2) on the Columbia River and built her a 22-room house which was eventually demolished for the construction of the Bonneville Dam.
[61] Sam arranged a marriage of convenience for Mona Bell to his cousin Edgar Hill, again allowing his child to be raised as legitimate, and this time as a legal member of his natural father's family.
[63] He believes that Hill was at least somewhat manic-depressive and sees strong signs of a manic, or at least hypomanic, state in his many, often abortive projects in the 1920s[64] and possibly of paranoia in his belief that the Soviet Union was out to harm him.
[67] The recorded cause of death is "an abscess of the lesser peritoneal cavity which had ruptured into the stomach, producing fatal / terminal hemorrhages.
