Samuel Billingsley Hill is Born

Today in Masonic History Samuel Billingsley Hill is born in 1875.

Hill was born on April 2, 1875 in Franklin, Arkansas. He attended the common schools, then the law school or department of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. In 1898, the same year he graduated, he was admitted to the bar. The same year he established his practice in Danville, Arkansas. He was soon elected Danville Mayor, and the Chairman of the Democratic Central Committee for Yell County. He was very active in the development of rural areas, by 1899 with partners he started the Danville Turnpike Company.

In 1904 he moved to Waterville, Washington, a small farming and wheat growing area in Eastern Washington. There he continued to practice law until he became the prosecuting attorney for Douglas County from 1907 to 1911. He was a superior court judge for Douglas and Grant Counties from 1917 to 1924.

He ran in 1924 as a Democrat to fill the seat that J. Stanley Webster vacated in the Sixty-Ninth Congress. He was re-elected for the next five terms serving from September 23, 1925 until his own resignation June 25, 1936. During years in the House he strongly advocated for the funding of Grand Coulee Dam. The Wenatchee Dispatch called him the "political Father of the Grand Coulee Project."

On May 21, 1936 he was confirmed as a member of the United States Board of Tax Appeals [later called the United States Tax Court] and he continued to serve on that bench until he retired as a judge on November 30, 1953. He died (age 82) in Bethesda, Maryland on March 16, 1958. He is buried in the Historic Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington D. C.

Hill was a member of Badger Mountain Lodge #57 in Waterville. There is no record of his having held an office in the small lodge.

This article provided by Brother Coe Tug Morgan – Honorary Grand Secretary, Past Grand Historian Grand Lodge F. & A. M. of Washington.