Seattle Gum Wall is covered in thousands of pieces of chewing gum that have been placed on the side of the Post Alley's Market Theater (now Unexpected Productions) since the early 1990s.
USA: Washington – Maryhill Museum
🗺️ Sam Hill, Stonehenge, and a Town Famous for Its Watermelons
We had our longest travel day yet ahead of us on the Oregon road trip, but that was never going to stop us from poking our noses into things along the way. We were up and out early, which for us counts as something of an achievement.
It was yet another fine day — the Pacific Northwest had been remarkably generous with the weather, as if it had something to prove — and we pulled off I-84 to have a look at Hermiston. Hermiston is famous, apparently, for its watermelons. And that, I’m afraid, is about as much as there is to say about Hermiston. The drive in was quick, the drive out was quicker, and I suspect we are the first and last tourists the place will ever see from our particular postcode.
What had actually piqued our interest for the day was the Maryhill Museum of Art, which sat at roughly the halfway point on our journey to Portland. The museum was founded by one Sam Hill, who lived from 1857 to 1931 and was, by all accounts, an extraordinary man — the sort of restless, visionary, slightly unhinged character that the American West seemed to produce in industrial quantities during the late nineteenth century.
Hill was originally a child of the Midwest, born in the aftermath of the Civil War into a country that was still stitching itself back together. Somewhere along the way he fell completely and utterly in love with the Pacific Northwest and relocated himself there with the sort of committed enthusiasm that most people reserve for much smaller decisions. His fortune came from railroads — always railroads in those days — and from working in the businesses of his father-in-law, James J. Hill (no relation, though the shared surname must have caused some confusion at family gatherings), who was one of the great railway barons of the era.
When Sam moved to Seattle, his wife Mary — a sensible woman, as it turned out — lasted approximately six months before packing up the children and heading back to Minneapolis. And honestly, you couldn’t blame her. The Northwest in the early 1900s was still genuinely wild territory: remote, wet, rugged, and not especially accommodating to anyone who’d grown up with reliable indoor heating and a decent milliner’s nearby. Sam, however, was entirely undeterred by any of this.
He threw himself into building a legacy with the sort of manic energy that makes the rest of us feel quite tired just reading about it. His great passion was roads — proper roads, good roads, roads that connected communities and opened up the landscape. In September 1899, he founded the Washington State Good Roads Association, which then successfully lobbied the Washington State Legislature to establish a state highway department in 1905. Not content with that, Hill persuaded the University of Washington to create the United States’ first Chair in Highway Engineering in 1907. The man essentially invented the very concept of American road infrastructure, which makes him either a visionary or the person ultimately responsible for the existence of the American road trip — take your pick.
After failing to convince Washington State to build a highway along the north bank of the Columbia River (some bureaucratic battles, it seems, are the same in every century), he turned his charm on Oregon and successfully persuaded officials there to construct the scenic Columbia River Highway. This remarkable road linked coastal Astoria in the west with The Dalles further east — a genuinely beautiful stretch of engineering that still impresses today.
Sam had also purchased a large parcel of land in Klickitat County, Washington, right along the Columbia River, which he named Maryhill after his wife and daughter — a touching gesture, though perhaps slightly undermined by the fact that neither of them actually wanted to be there. His grand plan was to establish a farming community on the land. Unfortunately for Sam, Klickitat County is not what you’d call generously watered. It doesn’t rain a great deal. The farming community dried up, which, under the circumstances, is probably the most geographically appropriate thing that could have happened.
Today, rather satisfyingly, the area does produce some very good wines. Modern irrigation systems — not available in Hill’s day — have transformed the land, and the Columbia River Gorge is now recognised as a proper wine-producing region. Sam would have approved, I think, even if he’d have preferred corn.
In a last-ditch attempt to entice Mary back to Washington State, Hill built a grand mansion on his Maryhill estate. The plan failed. Mary stayed in Minneapolis. The building sat empty for years, a large and expensive monument to romantic optimism and poor geographical decision-making, until it was eventually converted into the museum that stands there today. The collection, incidentally, is rather good — far better than you’d expect to find perched on a bluff above the Columbia River in the middle of nowhere, which is very much part of its charm.
Monuments were another of Sam’s enthusiasms. He was responsible for the Peace Arch, which straddles the I-5 border crossing with Canada at Blaine, Washington — a structure we had encountered rather more than we’d expected during our recent trips to and from Vancouver to catch flights. It sits there looking very pleased with itself, as border monuments tend to do.
But the one we absolutely had to see was his Stonehenge. Yes, Stonehenge. Built between 1918 and 1930, Hill constructed a full-scale concrete replica of the Wiltshire original on a bluff right next to his Maryhill estate, high above the Columbia River. Now, I want to be clear: this was not built for druids in bedsheets to shuffle around during the summer solstice feeling spiritually significant. This Stonehenge was conceived as a war memorial — a monument to the young men of Klickitat County who fell during the First World War, a conflict that had ended just as construction began.
Hill had mistakenly believed, based on the scholarship of his day, that the original Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain had been used as a site of human sacrifice. His intention was to remind future generations that, in effect, young men were still being sacrificed — on battlefields rather than altars, but sacrificed nonetheless. It was, when you think about it, rather a powerful idea.
The structure itself is neater and more precisely rendered than its ancient counterpart back home. The stones are cast concrete rather than sarsen and bluestone hauled across Bronze Age Britain at considerable inconvenience to everyone involved, so it lacks that particular quality of slightly battered antiquity that makes the original so strange and moving. But it is, nonetheless, genuinely impressive — especially given that someone just decided to build it here, in rural Washington, because they felt strongly about it.
As always, reading the names of those who had died — young men from small towns and farming families, gone before they were thirty — brought the whole thing back down to earth. No monument, however eccentric its origins, can really soften that.
The setting, though, is spectacular. The bluff looks straight down to the Columbia River, wide and dark and moving fast below, with the hills of Oregon rising on the far bank. Sam Hill picked his spot well. Whatever else you might say about the man — and you could say quite a lot — he had an eye for landscape.
It was a wonderful place to stand and look, and we stood and looked for quite a while before getting back in the car and heading for Portland.
🏛️ The Maryhill Museum of Art — A Genuine Surprise in the Middle of Absolutely Nowhere
So, we drove the five miles or so down the road from that rather odd Stonehenge replica — yes, the one built by Sam Hill himself, a man who clearly had strong opinions about how to spend a fortune — and fetched up at the Maryhill Museum of Art.
I’ll be honest. My expectations at this point were, shall we say, modest. We were in the back of beyond in Washington State, in a landscape that’s more “dramatic emptiness” than “cultural hotbed,” and the idea of a serious art museum appearing out here felt about as likely as finding a Michelin-starred restaurant on the moon. But there it was.
The building itself is rather splendid, which, in hindsight, shouldn’t have surprised me at all. Sam Hill wasn’t the sort of man to do things by halves. He’d already demonstrated that with a full-scale concrete Stonehenge up the road, built as a war memorial between 1918 and 1929 — though he had some rather confused ideas about how the original functioned. The museum building, a grand concrete Beaux-Arts structure, sits overlooking the Columbia River Gorge with the quiet confidence of something that knows it has absolutely no business being here, but doesn’t care in the slightest.
Hill first had the idea of converting the building into a museum during a visit in 1917, when it had originally been intended as his private home. He was nothing if not flexible with his ambitions. The museum was formally dedicated on 5th November 1926 in a ceremony that, by any measure, was quite extraordinary for a remote corner of the American Pacific Northwest. The person doing the dedicating was Queen Marie of Romania — yes, you read that correctly — who had travelled to the United States on a rather high-profile tour that generated enormous press coverage at the time. She and Hill were old friends, having met during the aftermath of the First World War when Hill had been involved in relief efforts in Europe.
Queen Marie, who was a granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander II and was widely regarded as one of the more glamorous European monarchs of her era, didn’t just show up and cut a ribbon. She donated more than 100 objects to the new museum, including Romanian folk art, royal regalia, and various personal items — a rather more generous housewarming gift than a bottle of wine and some flowers.
Hill’s own contributions were equally eclectic. He donated nearly 90 Native American baskets — a collection he’d accumulated with considerable enthusiasm — along with more than 70 works by Auguste Rodin, including sculptures and watercolours. Hill and Rodin had been personally acquainted, and the collection here is said to be one of the more significant groupings of Rodin’s work in the western United States. Hill also threw in a good number of personal effects, the sort of things a well-travelled, well-connected American millionaire accumulates when he’s been gadding about Europe and rubbing shoulders with royalty and artists.
Over the decades since, subsequent museum directors and various patrons — friends and acquaintances of Hill’s circle and later donors — steadily added to the collection. The result, it has to be said, is genuinely eclectic: a chess set that once belonged to Napoleon sits alongside Native American artefacts, Rodin bronzes, and a remarkable collection of theatre costume designs. It shouldn’t work. By rights it ought to feel like a very wealthy man’s attic.
But somehow, it does work. Quite well, actually. Which was, frankly, not what I’d expected at all when we pulled into the car park.
👑 A Surprise Fit for a Queen
The first room you walked into was devoted entirely to Queen Marie — and blimey, nothing had prepared us for that.
Marie was born in 1875 as Princess Marie of Edinburgh, granddaughter of Queen Victoria and, as royal lineages tend to go, she was related to what felt like half the crowned heads of Europe. In 1893, she married Crown Prince Ferdinand of Romania — a match arranged with all the romantic spontaneity of a business merger — and eventually became Queen of Romania in 1914 when Ferdinand ascended to the throne. She died in 1938, leaving behind a legacy so lavish that chunks of it somehow ended up here, in rural Washington State, of all places.
And lavish is the word. The artefacts on display were not the sort of thing you expect to encounter in a town of a few thousand people somewhere between the wheat fields and the pine forests of the Pacific Northwest. These were items from a major European royal household — a dynasty with proper palaces and gold-leafed everything — and they looked every bit as grand as you’d imagine.
Among the personal possessions on show were letters written in Queen Victoria’s own hand to her granddaughter, which were rather extraordinary to look at, even through a glass case. There was also Marie’s wedding dress, from 1893, which was genuinely stunning — all ivory silk and imperial ambition — and several Fabergé eggs, those absurdly ornate little objects that the Russian Imperial jeweller Carl Fabergé made famous from the 1880s onwards. They were gorgeous, frankly, in the way that only things made for people with too much money and impeccable taste can be.
We stood there, slightly bewildered, in a museum in rural Washington, gawping at Fabergé eggs and Victorian royal correspondence. Not what we’d put on the itinerary, but then the best things rarely are.
🗿 Rodin — The Sculptor We Knew Nothing About (But Were Glad We Found Out)
One of the more unexpected highlights of the visit turned out to be an exhibit dedicated to Auguste Rodin — a man widely regarded as the father of modern sculpture, which, frankly, is the sort of title you’d expect to come with a rather interesting backstory. It did.
The exhibition wasn’t just a collection of finished bronzes and marble pieces, impressive as those were. There were also sketches, preparatory drawings, and workings that showed how Rodin actually arrived at his final forms — the messy, iterative, very human process behind what eventually became some of the most recognised sculpture in the world. Seeing the rough alongside the refined made the whole thing considerably more interesting than I’d anticipated, given that I’d walked in knowing almost nothing about the man.
And it turns out there was quite a lot to know.
François-Auguste-René Rodin was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a police clerk, and by all accounts had a fairly grim start to life. He was short-sighted to a degree that wasn’t properly understood or corrected at the time, which caused him significant difficulties at school — he struggled to read the blackboard, stumbled through standard academic work, and was eventually packed off to his uncle’s school at Beauvais, which didn’t go especially well either. He applied three times to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the obvious route for a young man wanting to make something of himself in the arts. They turned him down all three times. Three times. One imagines there was a certain satisfaction, decades later, when the world decided he was rather good after all.
He spent much of his early career doing what many unsuccessful artists do — decorative work, anonymous commissions, essentially anything that paid. He worked under the sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse for years, producing ornamental pieces for wealthy clients and grand buildings. Not exactly the romantic notion of the tortured genius at work in his studio, but it kept him going.
The women in Rodin’s life were, to put it diplomatically, a significant and complicated part of his story, and the exhibit addressed this with some honesty. Rose Beuret came into his life in 1864, a seamstress who became his companion, model, and mother of his son — and who remained devoted to him for over fifty years, despite Rodin’s various and rather well-documented entanglements elsewhere. He married her in January 1917, just weeks before she died and only ten months before he followed her. Some love stories, it seems, take the scenic route.
The more dramatic chapter, and the one that clearly caught the attention of the exhibition’s curators, was his relationship with Camille Claudel, who arrived as his student and assistant in the 1880s. She was a formidably talented sculptor in her own right — something the art world took rather too long to acknowledge properly — and their relationship was intense, creatively charged, and ultimately rather unhappy. Claudel eventually broke from Rodin around 1898, became increasingly isolated and unwell, and was committed to a psychiatric institution in 1913, where she remained until her death in 1943. It is not a cheerful footnote.
Rodin’s great public breakthrough came with The Age of Bronze in 1877, a life-sized male figure so naturalistic that he was accused — absurdly — of having cast it directly from a living model rather than sculpted it. He was eventually cleared of this, which says something both about the quality of his work and the imaginations of his critics. The Thinker, perhaps his most famous piece, was originally conceived in 1880 as part of a monumental commission called The Gates of Hell, itself inspired by Dante’s Inferno. It was, in the way of most ambitious creative projects, never fully completed in Rodin’s lifetime, though it remained a central obsession for decades.
He died in November 1917, aged 77, having spent much of his final years in failing health and some financial difficulty — the First World War having rather disrupted the market for large sculptural commissions, as one might expect.
We went in, as I said, knowing almost nothing. We came out knowing considerably more, and rather glad for it. That doesn’t happen as often as it should on these trips.
♟️ A Surprisingly Good Excuse to Stand Around Looking at Chess Sets
One of our favourite bits of the whole visit turned out to be a collection of chess sets — which, I’ll admit, isn’t something I’d normally say with any great enthusiasm. Chess, after all, is the sort of game that clever people play to make the rest of us feel stupid. But this collection was genuinely something else.
It all started, apparently, with a former director of the museum who had a proper passion for the game — the collecting side of it, at least. Over the years, one man’s obsession quietly snowballed into something rather impressive, with pieces and sets arriving from all corners of the world until the collection had grown into the substantial and wonderfully diverse display it is today. Nobody seems entirely sure when it formally became “a collection” rather than just “a lot of chess sets,” but there it is.
What strikes you immediately is the sheer variety of it all. Sets from dozens of different countries, spanning wildly different design traditions, materials, and periods of history — some clearly the work of serious craftsmen, others looking like they’d been knocked together by someone having a very good time indeed. It was a proper reminder that chess, for all its reputation as a cold, logical, cerebral pursuit — the sort of thing played in silence by men with beards and Very Serious Faces — has also inspired some genuinely playful and inventive creativity over the centuries.
The sets that really caught our eye, predictably enough, were the more quirky and comical designs.
🏛️ Native American Arts — A Genuine Masterpiece, Even if My Feet Disagreed
The exhibit of Native American arts turned out to be one of the finest collections I had seen in years of trudging around the United States, and believe me, we had covered a fair bit of ground by that point. The museum had done something rather clever — they had organised the whole thing by region, which actually made sense of what is, when you stop to think about it, an enormously complex and varied cultural landscape spanning thousands of years and hundreds of distinct peoples.
Every major region was represented. The Pacific Northwest tribes, whose art has always struck me as almost impossibly confident — all those bold totemic forms and formline designs that look deceptively simple until you realise each curve and ovoid is governed by a visual grammar refined over centuries. Then there were the pieces from the Southwest, the Pueblo peoples and the Navajo, whose geometric weaving traditions stretch back well over a thousand years. The blankets and rugs alone were worth the entrance fee, the dyes rich and the patterns so precise you’d think a computer had been involved, which of course it hadn’t — just extraordinarily skilled human hands working with methods passed down through generations.
And then there were the Alaskan tribes — often overlooked, and rather unfairly so. The Tlingit, the Yup’ik, the Aleut. Their work tends towards the intricate and the symbolic in equal measure, with objects like bentwood boxes and ceremonial masks that manage to be both practical and profoundly meaningful. The craftsmanship was, frankly, humbling, particularly when I considered that my own most ambitious woodworking project to date has been a slightly wobbly garden shelf.
What struck me most, standing there trying not to look as culturally underprepared as I felt, was the sheer intricacy of the designs. Not intricate in a fussy, over-elaborate way — intricate in the sense that every mark meant something, every pattern carried weight. These weren’t decorative flourishes. They were visual languages, encoding history, identity, clan relationships, and cosmology into objects that were also, sometimes, just a very well-made bowl.
We had seen Native American collections before, scattered across various institutions in our travels. Some were adequate. Some were the sort of thing you nod politely at and then immediately forget. This one was different. The curation was thoughtful, the labelling informative without being condescending, and the pieces themselves had clearly been selected with genuine care rather than simply piled in from storage to fill a room.
Reflections: Maryhill Museum of Art, Washington
What began as a long travel day on an Oregon road trip turned into one of the more memorable stops the Hoblets had made. The Maryhill Museum of Art — perched on a bluff above the Columbia River in a corner of Washington State that has little else to recommend it — defied every expectation they’d brought to the car park.
The visit was framed by the story of Sam Hill, the eccentric visionary behind it all: a railroad millionaire and passionate road-builder whose wife refused to join him in the Northwest, leaving his grand mansion empty until it became a museum. Nearby, his concrete replica of Stonehenge — built not for mysticism but as a First World War memorial — provided a genuinely moving opening to the day. Standing among the names of fallen young men from Klickitat County, with the Columbia River dark and wide below, brought the purpose of the monument into sharp focus.
Inside the museum, the surprises kept coming. A room dedicated to Queen Marie of Romania — whose personal donations included Fabergé eggs, Victorian royal correspondence in Queen Victoria’s own hand, and an 1893 wedding dress — felt completely improbable in rural Washington, and was all the more delightful for it. The Rodin collection, enriched by the exhibition’s exploration of the sculptor’s difficult early life and complicated personal relationships, left them knowing far more than they’d expected to. The chess set collection charmed them with its playfulness, and the Native American arts exhibit — organised by region and curated with evident care — stood out as one of the finest they’d encountered across years of American travel.
The recurring thread through all of it was pleasant astonishment. This was not a museum anyone plans a trip around, and yet it rewarded the detour completely. Sam Hill may have failed at farming, at convincing his wife to stay, and at building a community — but he left behind something genuinely worth finding.
Planning your visit to Maryhill Museum of Art
| Address: | 35 Maryhill Museum Dr, Goldendale, WA |
| Website: | https://www.maryhillmuseum.org/ |
| Telephone: | T:(509) 773-3733 |
| Hours: | March 15 – November 15 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. DAILY |
| Admission Fees | Adults-$12 | Seniors-$10 | Youth (7-18)-$5 | Children (6 & Under) Free |
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