Maryhill Stonehenge

Samuel Hill built a full-size Stonehenge above the Columbia River as a war memorial, partly because he believed the original had been a place of human sacrifice. The museum he founded, Maryhill Museum of Art, says he visited England's Stonehenge in April 1915 as the guest of Lord Kitchener, who, the museum says, purportedly told him the ancients there had "offered bloody sacrifices to their heathen gods of war". Hill, a Quaker and pacifist, took the monument as a model for remembering the soldiers lost to what he saw as the folly of war. The museum calls that reading of Stonehenge erroneous.

Hill appears to have conceived the memorial in early 1918, according to the museum. He first meant to use local stone but settled on cast-in-place, steel-reinforced concrete, with the wooden forms lined with crumpled tin to imitate hand-hewn stone. With a solar eclipse due on 8 June 1918, astronomers were in the area, and William Wallace Campbell of Lick Observatory agreed to fix the position of the altar stone. The memorial is aligned to the astronomical horizon rather than the actual midsummer sunrise, a three-degree difference from the original.