814 East Highland Drive
Seattle, WA, USA

Sam Hill House (Seattle)

Sam Hill House is a historic, privately owned home located in Seattle, Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The property forms part of the city-designated Harvard-Belmont Landmark District.

The concrete building was constructed between 1909 and 1910 by railroad magnate Sam Hill in preparation for a planned visit to Seattle by a member of the Belgian royal family. Following Hill's 1931 death, the home remained vacant until its purchase in 1937 by Theodore and Guendolen Plestcheeff. Guendolen Plestcheeff, a notable local preservationist, remained resident at the property until her death in 1994.

In 2016 the home went on sale for $15 million.

National Register of Historic Places - Sam Hill House (Seattle)

Statement of Significance:

The Samuel Hill House is significant to the city of Seattle and to the state as a well preserved and early example of monolithic concrete construction for residential purposes. The house was completed in 1909 for Samuel Hill, son-in-law of Great Northern Railroad tycoon James Jerome Hill and a man renowned in his own right as an advocate of good roads and peace between nations. Perhaps more than any other single figure, Sam Hill was responsible for promotion of two of the great highway construction projects in the Pacific Northwest, namely: the Columbia River Highway and the Pacific Coast Highway. Hill gave impetus to these and other projects through generous financial backing as well as by his expertise and his considerable talent for advocacy. He made innumerable trips abroad, beginning with his Great Northern Railway days and continuing through the First World War, when he traveled for war relief programs. Hill became acquainted with nobility as readily as he mixed in business and engineering circles, and he seemed able to use his friendships with distinguished persons creatively in the causes of peace and good roads. Among his most celebrated friendships were those with Crown Prince Albert, later King of Belgium, and Queen Marie of Romania. By his own account, it was for the sake of entertaining the Belgian heir apparent that Hill constructed his home in Seattle. Designs in the Neoclassical Style were provided by the noted Washington, D.C. firm of Hornblower and Marshall the Seattle house is the earliest of four monuments to an outstanding career largely devoted to the public interest. The other landmarks are "Maryhill" (1914), Hill's home on the Columbia River which eventually became a public museum; the nearby replica of Stonehenge, intended as a memorial to Klickitat County war dead; and the International Peace Portal (1921) on the Canadian border at Blaine, Washington. Each was constructed of reinforced concrete; the advantageous properties of which Hill knew well in his capacity as a builder of roads.

Samuel Hill (1857-1931), a native of Deep River, Randall County, North Carolina, claimed to be a descendent of Samuel Hill, Oliver Cromwell's Minister of Finance who emigrated to the American colonies after the Restoration. Hill's father, Nathan B. Hill, was a. North Carolina planter, banker, and good roads advocate. Nathan Hill also was a Quaker with strong Union leanings who reportedly headed a southern branch of the underground railroad by which slaves were shipped to Canada. At the outbreak of the War Between the States, the elder Hill moved his family to Minneapolis.

Samuel Hill attended Haverford College, where his father had been awarded a degree in 1846. During summer vacations he gained valuable experience working on the geological survey of Pennsylvania, at which time he encountered and was impressed by A. J. Cassatt of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Hill was graduated from Haverford in 1878 and went on to Harvard University for a year. Upon returning to Minneapolis, he secured a job as clerk in a law office, read law in his spare time, and was admitted to the bar in 1880. Early in his career as an attorney, Hill won several damage suits against the railroad system headed by James Jerome Hill. By Samuel Hill's own account, he was summoned by the "empire builder" and offered a post as associate counsel for the St. Paul and Northern Pacific Railway and the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway. Hill reportedly accepted the offer on the basis that he would work without pay if he might be permitted to learn railroading. He held the job from 1884 to 1888 before advancing as president of several railroads in the system reorganized by J. J. Hill in 1890 as the Great Northern Railroad. Samuel Hill subsequently became a member of the Great Northern's board of directors. During these years in Minneapolis young Hill met and married J. J. Hill's daughter, Mary, for whom the remote mansion of the Columbia River in Washington would eventually be named. Hill cultivated other business and civic opportunities. He was president of the Minneapolis Trust Company 1888-1903, a vice-president of the Minneapolis Athenaeum Library from 1884, and an overseer of Harvard University 1900-1906.

The turn of the century marked a shift in Sam Hill's interests to the Northern Pacific Coast, the commercial prospects of which the Great Northern Railroad vastly enhanced upon completion of the line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound in 1893. In August 1901 Seattle newspapers reported that Samuel Hill, then president of Seattle Gas and Electric Company, would make his home in Seattle. Three months later, Hill leased his first home in the area. His personal fortune secured by real estate investments and assorted profitable enterprises, Hill now began tireless efforts on behalf of a viable system of market roads and highways for motor traffic. He pursued these efforts for the rest of his life., and they constituted the work for which he is best remembered in the Pacific Northwest today.

Hill served as president of the American Road Builders Association. He was the long-time president of the Pacific Highway Association and was made an honorary life member of the Washington Good Roads Association. Perhaps his crowning achievement was the vital part he played in the planning and construction of the Columbia River Highway, which traced the upper levels of the south bank of the Columbia, the natural boundary between Washington and Oregon. Begun as a comprehensive project in 1913, the road which linked the inland empire to Portland's deep-water port was opened to traffic in 1916. Celebrated equally as an engineering feat and for its scenic characteristics, which included a number of spectacular vistas, the road ultimately extended 200 miles to meet the Pacific Ocean. Hill not only agitated for the road, he backed the enterprise, along with several prominent Oregonians, and he financed a trip abroad for Samuel C. Lancaster, one of the highway's principal engineers, so that the best road building techniques in central Europe's mountainous terrain could be observed at first hand.

Samuel Hill's work on behalf of the Pacific Highway, which connected coastal communities between Canadian and Mexican borders, was culminated in 1921 by the dedication of the International Peace Portal on the U. S.-Canadian border at Blaine, Washington. It was the first three official ceremonies marking the opening of the highway. With characteristic showmanship, Hill organized an elaborate observance which {progressed in stages from the Mayflower barn at Jordans, England and Ghent, Belgium to Blaine. To commemorate the common ancestry of Canadian and U. S. citizens and the peace which had existed along the border since the signing of the Treaty of Ghent by Great Britain and the United States in 1814, Hill acquired and personally escorted a relic of the ship Mayflower to Blaine, where it was imbedded in the reinforced concrete Neo-Classical portal. In the intervening years the Peace Portal has been the backdrop for recurring patriotic ceremonies. Hill generously provided for the needs of motorists traveling across the international border in the early automobile era by building several restaurants, cook houses, an auto camp, hotel, and golf course. Not intended for profit, he claimed, these were ventures of goodwill, and indeed they were in keeping with a widely-held goal of the time to stimulate tourism in Washington and Oregon.