Stonehenge War Memorial

Long before Sam Hill arrived, this stretch of the Columbia was home to the Klickitat and Wishram peoples, who lived along the river and depended on its salmon runs. A short distance downstream lay Celilo Falls, one of the greatest fishing and trading places in North America, where Native families had gathered for thousands of years. Under treaties signed in 1855, the tribes ceded much of this land, and their descendants today are enrolled in tribes including the Yakama and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. Celilo Falls itself was drowned by the rising water behind The Dalles Dam in 1957.

Sam Hill bought thousands of acres on the Washington bluff in the early years of the twentieth century, hoping to found a Quaker farming community he named Maryhill after his wife and daughter. The farm colony never took root, but Hill stayed attached to the place. In 1914 he began building the great house on the bluff that would eventually become the Maryhill Museum of Art.

Hill visited the real Stonehenge and, according to the accounts he left, was told that the ancient monument had been a site of blood sacrifice. He was a Quaker and a pacifist, and the idea stayed with him. When the United States entered the First World War, he resolved to build a full-scale replica of Stonehenge as a memorial, so that people would remember that humanity was still being offered up to the god of war.

The first stones were dedicated in 1918, while the war was still on, making it one of the earliest war memorials in the nation. The full monument was completed and formally dedicated in 1929, when the names of local servicemen who had died were placed on its pillars. Because Hill built in reinforced concrete rather than in stone, and because he was working from the ruined original, his Stonehenge is what the real one is thought to have looked like when it was new and whole.

Hill died in 1931, and his ashes were placed in a crypt on the hillside just below the memorial he raised. He is buried within sight of the ring, on the bluff he loved, above the river that carried the trains and the salmon and the history of the Gorge.

The replica is arranged as the original at Stonehenge is thought to have stood when it was intact, a full outer ring of upright stones capped by a continuous circle of lintels, with the taller trilithons stepping up toward the center. Because Hill was recreating the monument whole rather than as a ruin, the effect is more complete and more legible than the tumbled original in England, and you can walk freely among the pillars.

The stones are not stone at all. Hill built the memorial in reinforced concrete, and to imitate the rough, pitted surface of the ancient sarsens the builders cast the concrete against crumpled metal, giving the pillars a weathered texture up close. The names of Klickitat County's war dead are set into the monument, which is why it reads as a memorial the moment you understand what you are looking at.

The setting does much of the work. There are no trees to soften it, only the open bluff, the wide brown-and-green sweep of the Gorge, and the Columbia moving far below. On a clear day the Oregon hills rise across the water, and the wind rarely stops, which lends the ring a stark, elemental feeling that suits its purpose.

The eastern Columbia River Gorge is a different country from the mossy, waterfall-hung western Gorge closer to Portland. Here the walls are drier and more open, the hills go gold in summer, and the light is big and clear. The Columbia is one of the great rivers of the continent, and the bluff gives you a long, uninterrupted look at it.

Wind defines this place. The Gorge acts as a natural funnel between the wet west side and the dry interior, and the steady blast that batters the memorial is the same wind that has made the nearby town of Hood River and the Gorge waters famous with windsurfers and kite-boarders. Watch the river long enough on a breezy afternoon and you will usually see sails out on the water.

This is also raptor and open-country bird terrain. Hawks ride the updrafts along the bluffs, and the dry grasslands above the river hold meadowlarks and other high-desert species that you would not find in the forested western Gorge.

Spring greens the bluff grasses and brings wildflowers to the surrounding hills, with mild temperatures that make the exposed, shadeless site comfortable to explore.

Summer turns the hills gold and hot, and the wind, though relentless, at least keeps the bluff bearable. Early morning and evening are the most pleasant times to visit, and the low light on the pillars is at its best then.

Fall brings clear, settled weather and thinner crowds, often the finest stretch of the year in the eastern Gorge, with warm days and cool nights.

Winter is cold, gray, and windswept, and the bluff can feel bleak, though a clear, frosty day gives the concrete ring a severe kind of beauty against the empty river country.

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