<P> Sam Hill was a mercantile store owner who offered a vast and diverse inventory of goods . People began using the term "what in the Sam Hill is that?" to describe something they found odd or unusual, just like the inventory found in Sam Hill's store . The original Sam Hill Mercantile building still stands on Montezuma Street in Prescott, Arizona, and is listed on the register of Historic Places . </P> <P> An article in the New England Magazine in December 1889 entitled "Two Centuries and a Half in Guilford, Connecticut" mentioned that, "Between 1727 and 1752 Mr. Sam . Hill represented Guilford in forty - three out of forty - nine sessions of the Legislature, and when he was gathered to his fathers, his son Nathaniel reigned in his stead" and a footnote queried whether this might be the source of the "popular Connecticut adjuration to' Give' em Sam Hill'?" </P> <P> The millionaire Samuel Hill, a businessman and "good roads" advocate in the Pacific Northwest, became associated with the phrase in the 1920s . A reference appeared in Time magazine when Hill convinced Queen Marie of Romania to travel to rural Washington to dedicate Hill's Maryhill Museum of Art . The fact that "Father of Good Roads" Samuel Hill hadn't been born when the figure of speech first appeared in a publication rules out the possibility that he was the original Sam Hill in question . </P> <P> A possible origin for the phrase "Sam Hill" is the surveyor Samuel W. Hill (1819--1889). Hill allegedly used such foul language that his name became a euphemism for swear words . In the words of Charles Eschbach, "Back in the 1850s the Keweenaw's copper mining boom was underway . There were about a dozen men who pretty much ran the Keweenaw . They were mining company agents, the' go between' for the investors from Boston and the actual mining production people . Their names were attached to every report sent back to eastern investors . Among these company agents was a man named Samuel W. Hill . Sam was a geologist, surveyor, and mining engineer and had considerable power in the Keweenaw ." </P>

Where did the expression what in sam hill come from