Maryhill Museum of Art

The museum was built by Sam Hill, a Minneapolis railroad executive and Quaker who came to the Northwest around the turn of the twentieth century with big, restless ideas. In 1914 he began building a grand reinforced-concrete mansion on this bluff, at the center of what he hoped would become Maryhill, a Quaker farming community named in part for his wife and daughter, both named Mary.

The town never took root. The land was dry and remote, the settlers did not come, and the great house sat unfinished on its windy bluff. What might have been a costly failure became something stranger and better, thanks to two remarkable women in Hill's orbit.

In 1917 Hill's friend Loie Fuller, an American dancer and impresario famous across Europe, persuaded him to turn the empty mansion into an art museum. Fuller's connections in the Paris art world became the museum's foundation, and through her the collection gained more than eighty works by the sculptor Auguste Rodin, the heart of the collection to this day.

The other friend was royalty. On November 3, 1926, Queen Marie of Romania, a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria, traveled to this lonely bluff to dedicate the still-unfinished museum before a crowd of thousands, in a ceremony that made national news. She left behind more than seventy objects, including furniture, portraits, and regalia that still form a gallery of their own. The building did not fully open to the public until 1940, nine years after Hill's death.

For a museum this far from any city, the range is astonishing. The Rodin galleries hold sculptures, plaster studies, and drawings that trace how the artist worked. Nearby are Queen Marie's royal collection, a large gathering of Native American baskets, beadwork, and regalia, and cases of Russian and Greek Orthodox icons.

The showstopper for many is Théâtre de la Mode, a set of roughly two-foot-tall wire mannequins dressed by the great Paris fashion houses just after World War Two, when real fabric was scarce and French couturiers used these tiny figures to prove their industry had survived. There are also chess sets from around the world, a gallery on the region's Native peoples, and rotating exhibitions, all under one improbable roof.

Half the pleasure is the setting. The terraces and lawns look out over a wide, golden stretch of the Columbia Gorge, with the river far below and the Oregon hills beyond, and a sculpture garden and picnic grounds spread across the grounds. Peacocks sometimes wander the property, and the light on the gorge at the ends of the day is worth lingering for.

The museum runs on a seasonal schedule, generally open from spring through fall, so it pairs best with a warm-weather gorge trip. Come ready for wind and, in summer, real heat on this exposed bluff. Three miles east stands the other half of Sam Hill's legacy, his full-scale Stonehenge war memorial, and it makes the perfect companion stop.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.