“Sam Hill’s Mansion” is currently listed for sale at $15 million. This property has long held a special mystique for me. For a number of years, I worked nearby. On a dozen occasions or more I’ve gone there to take it in, imagine the amazing history it has seen, and feel its obvious connection to Maryhill Museum.
I am a Sam Hill history junkie, an interest rooted in my childhood.
I grew up smack in the middle of one of Hill’s most amazing engineering accomplishments, a road now called the Columbia River Gorge Scenic Highway. I have lingered along it hundreds of times—soaking my feet in the icy cold waters of Ainsworth Spring on a hot summer day with my grandfather, jogging past the Vista House at majestic Crown Point at 6 AM on a spring morning, and nearly being blown off the same spot by 80 mph winds on a winter night. As Sam intended, the highway is a unique and intimate link between man and nature.
As a child, I visited family friends at a mysterious house—a 22-room mansion built on a wooded, rocky perch overlooking the Columbia River—that Hill built for his best known mistress, Mona Bell. My mother tells of Samuel Lancaster, Hill’s chief engineer on the Scenic Highway project, speaking to her grade school class at Bonneville. And as a child, I marveled at Maryhill Museum—for the grandeur of the structure, for its mysteriously desolate setting, and for its weird history.
Reading about Hill in my adult years only deepened my fascination with this rich, influential, and quirky gentleman. A self-made railroad millionaire born to Quaker farmers, at the age of 47 he abandoned his professional and personal life back East to live the rest of his adventurous years in Portland and Seattle. He was a frequent world traveler who kept trunks of clothes at various luxury hotels in Europe. He was friends with kings, queens, princes, and politicians.
Harvard educated, he spoke fluent German, French, Italian, and a moderate amount of Russian. He was reportedly the only white person to be invited to the funeral of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe. He founded—and in some cases bankrupted—companies including some of the earliest Northwest gas, electric, and telephone utilities.
Hill’s Seattle residence located at 814 E. Highland Drive was originally completed in 1910. It was built on a 5-acre parcel; it now sits on a 31,000 square foot lot. Sam hired the architectural firm of Hornblower and Marshall of Washington, D.C. The firm had designed the Army and Navy Club, the Natural History Building of the Smithsonian group, and the Custom House at Baltimore. He paid $750 for the plans and specifications, and worked closely with the firm in designing the Grecian Doric structure. In a handwritten memo, Sam documented the total construction cost as $37,828. Of this, about $16,000 went for payrolls, and $10,000 for steel and concrete. Some of the workers were later hired to build stone retaining walls in the Columbia River Gorge Highway project.
The home featured 6 bedrooms and bathrooms, a rooftop garden, and the first elevator in any Seattle home. Hill gave personal attention to exterior landscaping, and provided exact coordinate details for the building of an accurate sundial which is now—separately from the house—a National Historic landmark. He oversaw the careful removal and transplanting of 50-year-old ivy growth from an abandoned cabin, so that his new home immediately had the look of an old residence.
Sam Hill with members of Belgian military mission, 1918. From John Tuhy’s book Sam Hill: The Prince of Castle Nowhere.
In his later years, Hill had paranoid tendencies. He was worried not only about burglars, but thought that Soviet spies were after him. He slept in a very small room that had a button that would turn on all lights in the residence, and a door to a secret passageway that would let him escape to the first floor or basement.
To say the concrete and steel house was built solidly is an understatement. Sam once told his valet that if the house toppled over and fell into the valley below and landed right side up, he would only have to connect up to water and go right on living in it!
Sam’s wife never lived in the house. She left Sam, and Seattle, in 1903 with their two children. Notable dinner guests at the residence were Queen Marie of Romania, Marshal Joseph Joffre (Commander in Chief of French forces in WWI), and a Belgian military mission.
Sam died in 1931. It was not until 1937 that his estate was settled, and many of the household furnishings were moved to Maryhill Museum. The house was sold to Mr. & Mrs. Theodore Pletscheef, who converted it into a duplex. It remained largely unchanged in the years since, until its recent $10 million renovation.
The residence is a National Historic Landmark, as is (separately) the sundial. Because of that status, it qualified for a special tax exemption. Until the year 2021, the tax bill on this property is $0. Here’s a Seattle Times article explaining why. (Although the tax bill on the house is $0, special utility assessments, and tax on an attached vacant lot, bring the actual annual tax bill to about $3,500.)
To learn more about Sam Hill’s strange and magnificent life, I recommend the book Sam Hill: The Prince of Castle Nowhere by John E. Tuhy. And, here is an informative and amusing recreation of a 1932 article from The Seattle Times, via the Goldendale Sentinel.
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