Sam Hill was a wealthy, happy-go-lucky eccentric millionaire and philanderer, which mixed oddly with his Quakerism. James J. Hill hired Sam Hill into the Northern Pacific Railroad legal department 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 became president or director of a half-dozen of J.J. Hill’s subordinate railroads.
Sam Hill often visited Vancouver to talk about his primary interest: roads. From Washington. D.C., in 1907, he wrote to The Columbian praising the newspaper for “giving time, space and intelligent effort to the cause of good roads.” A sentence later, he added, “It may interest the readers to know that the U.S. government is awakening to the cause.” Hill was president of the Washington State Good Roads Association at the time.
That same year, Hill started creating a farming community on 7,000 acres on the north side of the Columbia River, where he began building a mansion that would later become the Maryhill Museum of Art. Hill’s biographer, John Tuhy, wrote that Hill may have used the anticipated visit of Belgian Prince Albert, who supposedly would attend the 1909 Alaska-Yukon Exposition, to justify his mansion to the public. The prince didn’t show. Nevertheless, Hill met with the American Congress of Roadbuilders in Alaska.
Hill often admitted good roads were his “religion.” He began building experimental roads on his property in about 1909. When Washington Gov. Marion May thwarted Hill’s effort to create a roadway north of the Columbia River, he turned south to Oregon. After showing his experimental roads to Oregon Gov. Oswald West and legislators, he began planning the Columbia River Highway.
