This is weird.

In all the best ways.

High above the Columbia River Gorge, on a remote bluff in southern Washington, one of the most improbable museums in the world stands.

“Maryhill was never meant to be ordinary,” Maryhill Museum of Art Executive Director Amy Behrens said in a press release announcing the museum’s 100^th anniversary events taking place in 2026.

The origins of Maryhill Museum of Art trace back to an unlikely collaboration among four remarkable figures: entrepreneur Sam Hill, modern dance pioneer Loïe Fuller, San Francisco arts patron Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, and Queen Marie of Romania–granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria.

“Loïe Fuller was really the connector of the group,” Behrens told me in a video interview. “She had danced in Bucharest back in 1902 and was seen by Queen Marie, who was so enchanted that she issued an invitation to have Loïe dance at the palace so her children could see her.”

The two developed a friendship and began corresponding.

Half a world away and over a decade later, in 1915, Fuller was introduced to Hill through Spreckels in San Francisco. Spreckels and Hill had met the year prior in San Francisco; she also met Fuller in Paris that year. This group obviously possessed incredible wealth and privilege to travel so widely in the early 20th century.

In 1917, Fuller convinced Hill to turn his unfinished mansion in southern Washington into an art museum. Hill was then introduced to Queen Marie by Fuller in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference. In 1926, the Queen made the long trip west to dedicated the museum, which wouldn’t open to the public until 1940 due to Hill’s untimely death in 1931.

Together, their ambitions and influence helped transform an unfinished Beaux Arts mansion overlooking the Columbia River Gorge into one of the Pacific Northwest’s most distinctive cultural institutions.

It is a destination where art, landscape and history intersect.

Maryhill Museum of Art Collection

In the early 20th century, Hill purchased more than 5,300 acres above the Columbia River to establish a utopian farming community. When the agricultural project proved impractical, Hill’s plans for the mansion changed.

Encouraged by friends, particularly Fuller, whose connections in the European art world proved instrumental, Hill decided to establish an art museum instead. The museum was formally dedicated on November 3, 1926, when Queen Marie traveled to Washington State for the ceremony.

During her visit, she delivered a collection of artworks and personal objects to the museum including paintings, Russian icons, manuscripts, and the gown she wore to the 1896 coronation of her cousins, Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia.

The museum’s unique menagerie also includes more than 80 works by famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin, forming one of the most significant Rodin collections in the United States. Other holdings include European and American paintings, Native American baskets, and the Théâtre de la Mode, a rare collection of small-scale mannequins dressed in French designer fashions from the years immediately following World War II.

Weird.

“Our collections developed from the tastes of our four founders, and so our collecting plan today follows those tastes, with the notable exception of our chess sets,” Behrens explained.

Oh yeah, the historic chess sets.

That collection is owed to the museum’s first director, Clifford Dolph, who was a passionate correspondence chess player during World War II and developed a major exhibition of chess sets at Maryhill in 1957.

Weird.

The Museum’s ongoing collecting efforts support the original objects and interests of the founders. Its Indigenous Peoples of North America Gallery presents an encyclopedic collection from regions throughout the continent. Maryhill’s property sits adjacent to the Yakama Nation.

“One of the types of objects that Queen Marie gave to the museum when she dedicated it in 1926 were Romanian folk garments, chemises; they’re incredibly gorgeous,” Beherns said. “These early- to mid-20th century Romanian textiles have been associated with specific villages, so it's an example of identity-based clothing.”

Within the last handful of years, the Museum has begun collecting a different set of related garments.

“That textile collection paved the way for us to start collecting Central American textiles, primarily from Panama, Guatemala, and the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Temporally those are similar, mid-20th century, although they're very different, and we don't want to in any way flatten the comparison between the two, the similarities that we can see are the time period, and also that these are very identity-based garments that are unique from village to village that were almost eroded over time by social and economic and political change,” Behrens explained. “These are being recaptured by their people who are reclaiming them as part of a cultural identity. Because we have this heritage with these identity-based textiles from Romania, it gave us a jumping off point to have another point of relevancy with populations surrounding the museum to be stewards of something that culture keepers are continuing on.”

And then there’s the Stonehenge monument.

I haven’t mentioned Maryhill’s Stonehenge yet?

That’s the weirdest of all.

Maryhill Museum Stonehenge Memorial

Four miles east of the Museum stands one of the region’s most distinctive monuments. There, Hill constructed a full-scale replica of Stonehenge.

“In Sam Hill's time, the early 20th century, many historians believed that Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England was a monument of sacrifice, and although we know that is an erroneous assumption in the present day, that was a common (belief) at the time,” Behrens explained. “As a lifelong pacifist, (Hill) commissioned this Stonehenge Memorial monument as a symbol of the sacrifice that the people who fought for our country went through in World War I.”

Inscribed on the monument are the names of the men from Klickitat County who died in the Great War. The Stonehenge Memorial was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2021, following the museum building, which earned that same distinction in 1974.

Maryhill is also an official site of the National Historic Lewis and Clark Trail. The pair would have paddled by the Museum with their expedition in 1805.

Visiting Maryhill Museum of Art

The Maryhill Museum of Art is open annually from March 15 through November 15 in Goldendale, WA, 120 miles east of Portland mostly along I-84. It’s out there. The museum’s remote setting offers remarkably dark skies, making the landscape ideal for stargazing.

“It's a really dramatic location. Thinking about the Pacific Northwest, we all think of waterfalls and pine trees and forests and snow-capped mountains, and that is all the way up to the Cascades (mountain range)–from the (Pacific) coast up to the Cascades–which for us includes Mount Hood (Oregon), the Mount Fuji of the United States, this perfectly triangular mountain, and Mount Adams mirroring it on the north,” Behrens described. “At that point, the rain shadow starts, and the rain stops there.”

Forty miles northwest of Mount Hood, annual rainfall can total 45 inches. Towering lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine, and western red cedar grow 100 feet tall. Forty miles in the other direction, rainfall totals drop to roughly 15 inches annually. High desert. Drier, browner, absent the iconic trees, but no less stunning.

“It's a stark contrast, and because of the Missoula floods that happened thousands and thousands of years ago, the landscape has this incredible carved canyon going around the Columbia River,” Beherns explained. “By the time you get to Maryhill Museum of Art, it's rural, pastoral, it's wine country, it's orchard country, there are vineyards, peach orchards, cherry orchards, plum orchards, there are plenty of areas where you see cattle grazing, especially in the winter and spring, and the museum is perched on this cliff, all by itself, overlooking the gorge. The journey to get to the museum is definitely part of the experience.”

Maryhill’s grounds extend into the surrounding landscape with the William and Catherine Dickson Sculpture Park featuring large-scale works by Northwest artists.

Overnight accommodations can be found in abundance 30 miles from Goldendale in The Dalles, OR.

“It's one of the most distinctive museums in the US, and I know that's a bold statement, but (Maryhill) has such an incredible and unusual story, a remarkable story, the collections are also unusual and distinctive, but of a really high quality,” Behrens added.

Weird and wonderful.

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