MARYHILL, Wash. — It's a short road with a long and winding history.
"It is the first paved road in the state of Washington," said Amy Behrens, executive director of the Maryhill Museum of Art, which owns this historic stretch of road.
The Maryhill Loops Road in rural Klickitat County is what it looks like when one man's dream is paved with asphalt.
"He was kind of a maverick, honestly," Behrens said.
Samuel Hill made much of his fortune in the railroad business, but he kept his eyes on the road.
"In fact, there's a famous quote by Sam Hill that said: 'Good roads are my religion,'" Behrens said.
In the early 1900s, the automobile was on the rise, but the country's infrastructure was not keeping pace.
"The turn of the 20th Century, there were almost no paved roads," Behrens explained.
The streetwise Mr. Hill took 100,000 dollars of his own money and let it ride.
"He built this road, which was originally ten miles long, and it's composed of seven different types of prototype asphalt," Behrens said. "They created steep inclines. They created hairpin turns. They wanted to expose the driver to every potential type of circumstance so that they could figure out how these roads would react and what would ultimately be the best type of surface for this terrain."
The road was used to demonstrate the potential of paved thoroughfares, but it was a little too far ahead of the curve.
"It really didn't catch on in the state of Washington," said Behrens. "He was really, really petitioning with the Washington state senate, and was proposing to keep costs down by using convict labor. That wasn't terribly popular with the people at the time."
Turns out, it was actually Oregon that would first adopt much of the engineering on display here in the hills of south central Washington.
More than 100 years later, a few refurbished miles of the Maryhill Loops Road are open for special events, including gravity sports such as high-speed skateboarding.
Pedestrians and cyclists are welcome year-round. And two days a year, the motoring public is invited to cruise these hairpin turns in honor of the man who dreamed of rubber meeting asphalt road.
"All of these roads here, and the types of surfaces that people can drive upon, they wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the ingenuity and the persistence of Sam Hill," Behrens said.
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