Fair Wind/Chronicle

When the enormous rotor blades atop 15 450-foot-high wind turbines begin turning this year, they are expected to generate electricity for 250,000 households—and thousands of dollars in annual income for the Maryhill Museum of Art in Goldendale, Wash.

Wind power will now be among an array of unconventional resources helping to keep on view Maryhill’s eclectic holdings, everything from Auguste Rodin sculpture to Native American basketry to international chess sets. Thanks to the 5,300 acres also included in its assets, the museum has money flowing in from several creative revenue streams, ranging from crops and cattle to television commercials and extreme sports.

The museum, a three-story, Beaux Arts mansion, sits on a high bluff overlooking the Columbia River Gorge and in view of Oregon’s Mt. Hood. The surrounding acreage is home to war memorials—including a full-scale replica of Stonehenge, built by museum founder Sam Hill to honor local fallen World War II soldiers—as well as sculpture and flower gardens and idyllic, picnic-ready grounds patrolled by a pride of peacocks.

The 15 turbines soon arriving on this land will be carefully placed so as not to disrupt the museum’s panoramic vistas, says Gary Hardke, president and managing director of Cannon Power Group, which owns and operates the machines. They will be among a total of 88 turbines installed through Cannon’s Windy Point/Windy Flats project, one of the country’s largest wind energy projects and the first to generate profits for a nonprofit museum, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Cannon, based in San Diego, has signed a 40-year lease with Maryhill, agreeing to pay a minimum monthly rent as well as a percentage of the profits made from the energy produced. “It’s a virtual certainty the museum will be getting well in excess of $100,000 a year,” Hardke says, even if the gales that whip through the area—which he describes as the windsurfing capital of the world—somehow peter out. Museum Director Colleen Schafroth has deemed the partnership a “wind-win situation.”

Indeed, the promise of steady long-term income is good news for an institution that has had to round some unexpected corners to find funds. One example is the Maryhill Loops Road, the first asphalt-paved road in Washington, which weaves its way through the institution’s estate. Attracted to its picturesque views and sweeping curves, advertising agencies pay $1,000 per day to use the road to shoot car commercials. Sporting groups rent it to hold such events as the 2008 Festival of Speed, five days of downhill skateboarding, inline skating, street luging and gravity biking. In total, the museum rented out Maryhill Loops Road a dozen times last year, bringing in close to $26,000.

More conventional groups have also staked out space on the ranch. Maryhill leases several thousand acres to local farmers, says Jim Foster, incoming president of the museum’s board, which oversees the partnerships. One tenant runs cattle on the few bunches of grass found on the rocky ground; another runs a dryland farming operation, producing crops such as barley and wheat. Then there are the wine vineyards and fruit orchards—peaches, cherries and apricots.

The ranchlands committee, made up of volunteer farmers, advises the board on how to negotiate the leases, ensuring that the museum gets an appropriate cut from each. Sharecroppers, for example, provide the museum a minimum fee and a percentage of their profits, while the museum shares in the expenses of fertilizer, spray and feed. Altogether, the agricultural leases brought in about $100,000 in 2008.

The committee also makes sure that the land is properly conserved so that such partnerships can be maintained. “Our goals are to conserve and enhance the land and make it sustainable for future generations,” says committee chair Marty Hudson. “We try to maximize the productivity but not overdo it. We want the land to be a perpetual resource.”

Hill bought the first 240 acres of the ranch in 1907 and acquired more than 5,000 more over the next year. He hoped to establish a Quaker community, Schafroth explains, a place where “people from all walks of life would get along and work together peacefully.” But environmental and financial problems plagued the project and it never came to pass. A few high-profile friends—such as modern dance pioneer Loïe Fuller, who contributed to the Rodin collection, and Queen Marie of Romania, who donated Russian icons and gilded palace furniture—convinced Hill to turn the mansion he had intended to use as his home into a museum. He named the institution after his daughter, Mary, and left the land under the museum’s care.

With help from the fourth of the “four founders,” sugar heiress Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, the museum opened to the public in 1940. Each director since has added to its holdings, which now include nearly 30,000 objects. But Schafroth, who began at the museum as curator of education in 1986 and has been director since 2001, says her focus is on “acquisitioning money.” Even with the outside revenue, the Maryhill Museum has had some financial struggles of late. Costs have increased as the museum has stepped up its programming efforts: Last year’s lineup included a show of vintage race cars, a contemporary dance performance inspired by Fuller and an outdoor nighttime reading of W.B. Yeats at the Stonehenge Memorial. At the same time, admissions, which provide the majority of the institution’s $1.1 million budget, have dropped—from nearly 80,000 visitors a year in the 1980s to around 50,000 today. “It’s a significant loss of revenue,” Schafroth admits, attributing the downturn to Sept. 11, gas prices and competition from two fairly new local museums.

“Sooner or later, we will hit a point where we simply cannot afford to do what we’re doing now without a strong endowment,” Schafroth adds. Making the museum self-sufficient has thus become her primary concern. The endowment currently sits at a little more than $1 million; her goal is to raise it to $6 million, an objective she expects the wind energy project’s contribution will help her achieve. “It gives us breathing room,” she explained. “It is giving us time to not only get to that $6 million but maybe even go beyond it.”

Though room to breathe is hard to come by in the current economy, Schafroth says all museums can find creative ways to raise funds—even without 5,300 acres at their disposal. “When projects are proposed you sometimes say, ‘Oh, we can’t do that’—but sometimes you can,” she said. “You just have to keep your heart and mind open to the possibilities out there and explore them, because you never know what can develop.”