William Ellsworth Hill

William (Bill) Ellsworth Hill, 81, formerly of Dover, DE, passed away peacefully at his home in Newark on Tuesday, September 23, 2025.  

Bill was born in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1944 and grew up in Baltimore, MD.  In 1962 he entered the US Army, serving in Germany (at the same base as Elvis Presley a few years earlier, as he often liked to mention) and various other locales in the southern US and Europe specializing in Communications.  At the end of his military service in 1967 he traveled widely and lived briefly in both Germany and Portugal, eventually coming to Delaware around 1970. 

While Bill had many interests including reading (every place he ever lived was filled with books),  playing computer games, and in his later years visiting local wineries, his first and greatest passion was music, and he spent much of the late 1960s through the mid 1980s as a guitarist and singer, touring with several different country-rock bands.  Most notably he was a member of Rain, a well-known and popular band in the Dover area who toured nationally and recorded multiple singles. Rain was a tightly knit group of close friends (brothers, as Bill succinctly put it), and with them he played guitar and keyboards, sang vocals, and occasionally wrote songs for the group.  Following his musical career, he worked primarily in sales at various automobile dealerships around Dover and Smyrna, retiring in 2008.  He was preceded in death in 2018 by his wife of 9 years, Mary Walls of Dover.  

Bill is survived by his devoted and faithful partner Sherry Schnatz, of Middletown, his son Bill and daughter-in-law Cathy, of Newark, and two grandsons, Ted and Charles Hill.  Services will be held on Saturday October 18 at 1:00 pm at Hollywood Cemetery in Harrington, DE.  In lieu of flowers, the family encourages donations to the American Cancer Society.

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