Exploring a Northwest Museum

Here’s an idea for a spicy new soap opera we’ll call “Maryhill.”

The leading man, Sam Hill, is a hard-driving capitalist whose lady friends include a European queen, an exotic dancer and a bareback rider in a Wild West show.

Add to the cast a distraught daughter in need of psychiatric help, one of the world’s best-known sculptors and the wife of a California sugar millionaire.

For openers, the capitalist builds a fancy, Flemish-style chateau in the desolation of the Columbia Gorge wilderness. There isn’t even a road to the mansion. “Castle Nowhere,” critics call it.

And then our hero orders a bizarre replica of England’s Stonehenge to be erected nearby, a memorial, he says, to the World War I dead of Washington’s Klickitat County.

If the story line sounds familiar, you know something about Pacific Northwest history. There is a chateau called Maryhill, the Maryhill Museum of Art, about 1OO miles east of Portland, Ore., and Vancouver, Wash., and 13 miles west of Goldendale, the seat of Klickitat County. And there really was a Sam Hill.

All of the above--the late Queen Marie of Romania, the bareback rider, the dancer, the sculptor and the rest--were real people who figured in this tale of the Columbia Gorge country.

Hill, a frosty-haired romantic, married into the Great Northern Railway fortune, then added to his wealth as a globe-trotting entrepreneur and diplomat.

In addition to crafting Maryhill, he spearheaded construction in 1915 of Oregon’s Columbia River Scenic Highway and the Peace Arch on the Washington state-British Columbia boundary in 1921.

Hill died at 73 in Portland on Feb. 26, 1931.

There is a happy ending. Maryhill, after years of struggle and controversy, has become a popular destination for travelers in the Northwest, particularly those from Portland. The visitor count last year topped 72,000, up 4,000 from 1988.

Maryhill’s new season began March 15, and soon will feature some lively anniversary events along with a much needed face lift for the museum.

May 13 will be the 5Oth anniversary of the museum’s grand opening and the 133rd anniversary of Hill’s birth. There will be free admission, a giant birthday cake and roving actors portraying Hill, Queen Marie and the other Maryhill players.

May 28 will be the 6Oth anniversary of Hill’s spooky Stonehenge, crouching on a rocky ledge three miles east of Maryhill. A free twilight concert is scheduled that evening in the make-believe ruins.

Meanwhile, the Maryhill museum’s exterior is receiving $127,000 worth of cosmetic surgery. Experts discovered several areas of crumbling concrete. The stucco “skin” of the building also had deteriorated, and a new roof was needed.

The work is bringing to life some elegant architectural details that had been hidden for years, said Linda Brady Mountain, Maryhill’s director.

Inside, the museum still glitters with finery: one of Queen Marie’s coronation gowns and a dazzling assortment of works by Auguste Rodin, the French father of modern sculpture.

How did such exhibits land at Maryhill?

Queen Marie was here in 1926 to dedicate the unfinished shell at Maryhill in one of the region’s wackiest ceremonies ever. More about that later.

Rodin’s treasures found their way to Maryhill through the efforts of two of Hill’s close friends--Loie Fuller, an American avant-garde dancer who was the toast of Paris at the turn of the century, and Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of Adolph Spreckels, the San Francisco sugar baron.

Spreckels, an art collector, was Maryhill’s major benefactor until her death in 1938.

One of the museum’s gems is a small model of “The Thinker,” perhaps Rodin’s best-known work. The plaster figure is inscribed by the artist: “a Loie.”

There is also the Rodin Gallery, with more than 48 bronze, plaster and terra cotta pieces and about 20 of his drawings. Some of the plasters bear Rodin’s penciled corrections, even his fingerprints. It is as if the visitor were allowed to peek into Rodin’s studio in France, watching work in process.

Were Hill and Fuller lovers? Were Rodin and Fuller lovers? Historians still ask these questions.

In addition, there is the Queen Marie Gallery.

How did Hill come to know the glamorous queen, a granddaughter of England’s Queen Victoria and Russia’s Czar Alexander II?

Hill and Queen Marie formed a deep friendship when Hill joined in efforts for Romania’s recovery after World War I. “Sam Hill is my friend,” the queen said at the Maryhill dedication.

What a romp that was.

By the time the queen reached Maryhill on a cross-country rail tour, her tight schedule was unraveling and dignitaries aboard were brawling. Reporters covered every crisis with delight. One dubbed it a “circus train.”

On a chilly November morning here in 1926, Queen Marie’s composure was put to a regal test. Maryhill, she realized, was an unfinished hulk. The forlorn country around the future museum counted more rattlesnakes than humans. A red carpet for the ceremony had been borrowed from the back stairway of a Portland hotel.

But the queen wasn’t dismayed. “There is a dream built into this place,” she told the audience.

“Sam Hill knows why I came, and I am not going to give any other explanation. Sometimes the things dreamers do seem incomprehensible to others.”

Yes, there was a dream, but most of it never came true for Hill.

In the beginning, Hill bought 7,000 acres and built his mansion--a ranch house, he called it--because he hoped to plant a Quaker agricultural colony here on the north bank of the Columbia River.

Quaker delegations left unimpressed. Meanwhile, Hill’s marriage fell apart, and his cherished daughter, Mary, came down with a mental illness.

Ironically, the original land holding is intact. Leased for cattle grazing, orchards and other uses, it provides 4% of nonprofit Maryhill’s $449,000 annual operating budget.

The greatest percentage of revenue, 35%, is from an endowment left by Hill and admissions account for 28% of Maryhill’s income. Gifts, grants and the museum souvenir shop provide the balance.

Hill turned his attention from empty Maryhill to business ventures in Portland and Seattle, world travel and a run of monument building.

He also took a mistress, Mona Bell, a former bareback rider with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.

In the 1920s Hill built a 22-room home for Bell near what now is Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, about 30 miles east of Portland. They had a son, Sam B. Hill, given the Hill name through a symbolic marriage of Bell and Sam’s cousin, Edgar Hill.

It would be May, 1940, more than a dozen years after Queen Marie’s visit, before Maryhill would open as the Maryhill Museum of Art.

Sam Hill, Queen Marie and Fuller didn’t live to be part of that gala grand opening, but Sam was nearby, at least in spirit.

His ashes are buried under a granite tomb at Stonehenge, on a steep slope overlooking his beloved Columbia River.

The “Prince of Castle Nowhere” chose his own epitaph: “Amid nature’s great unrest, he sought rest.”

Exquisite Maryhill is his triumph, after all.