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Archaeologists believe Stonehenge was built in England between 3000 and 2000 B.C.

No one knows exactly why. Educated guesses suggest it was built as a place of healing. That’s nice. However, considering the average life expectancy then was 35, one must question the medicinal benefits of artfully arranging 25-ton rocks.

Stonehenge was apparently a massive medical miscalculation from an age before we learned to trust antibiotics more than pagan gods.

Still, Stonehenge is a neat place. So is the other Stonehenge – the one on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge across from Biggs Junction. It too was built based on a mistake.

If you ever wondered what the Sam Hill a replica of Stonehenge is doing along the gorge, you’ve already partially answered the question. The answer is Sam Hill.

Hill was, well, a bit of weirdo. By all accounts, he put the manic in manic-depressive. In the final years of his life he believed the Soviet Union was out to get him.

However, he was also a businessman, lawyer and railroad executive who gave the Northwest its first paved road and the Maryhill Museum of Art a few miles south of his Stonehenge replica. The museum was a bit of a boo-boo.

Hill bought the land for the museum in 1907, naming the parcel “Maryhill” after his wife. Like her husband, she had more issues than the American Journal of Psychiatry. She never lived anywhere near Maryhill and spent the balance of their tumultuous marriage battling her assorted demons in the Midwest.

Hill also failed to get anyone else to live at Maryhill, including all the people he hoped to attract with his vision of a Quaker community.

He started building what is now the museum building on the property, but it remained unfinished when he died in 1931. He originally wanted a mansion for his family, but he abandoned that idea because of financial setbacks, his wife’s mental issues, and assorted conflicts with Washington transportation officials.

A friend convinced him to make the building an art museum instead. It opened nine years after his death.

Hill’s other big project was Stonehenge. Little is known about the whys and wherefores of the original British version. Even less was known in 1918 when Hill decided to build a full-size replica.

Reeling from the bloodshed of World War II, Hill thought Stonehenge was an apt metaphor for the human sacrifice of war. The monument was dedicated in 1928 to the fallen soldiers of what was still called the War to End All Wars. Oops.

Yet Hill’s Stonehenge is still an impressive site. It offers a panoramic view of the Columbia Gorge that I imagine is even more breathtaking than the view from Wiltshire, England.

Of course, that’s just a guess, and goodness knows there have been too many guesses associated with those stone slabs. Hill thought the original was used for human sacrifices. The ancients may well have thought it had healing properties.

More recent theories suggest that it would have been impossible for people in 2000 B.C. to move big rocks. So, after space aliens were done building the pyramids in Egypt and drawing doodles on the ground in South America, they bopped over to England for fish and chips and stayed long enough to build Stonehenge.

Hey, it had been a long trip from the planet Koozebane, and they were really, really bored.

Sam Hill might have felt at home among people who believe aliens came millions of light years to play with our rocks. He was, as I said, a tad eccentric himself.

Lest he be written off as a complete loon, however, remember that he built the first asphalt-paved road in the Pacific Northwest with $100,000 of his own money. Maryhill Loop Road remains open to bicyclists and pedestrians to this day.

It is nonetheless good to remember that Hill’s Stonehenge was built on a false premise. While it stands as a monument to the fallen soldiers of World War I, it also stands as a monument to rash assumptions.

The stones remind us that our view of history is often built on such assumptions. I love visiting Hill’s Stonehenge. It reminds me to not only ask the questions, but question the answers.

“Building Curiosity” investigates intriguing, historical and obscure tidbits of the built environment. Tom Henderson is a reporter for the Daily Journal of Commerce. Contact him at 503-802-7226 or [email protected].