God bless this internet we have, and God save this Wikipedia that dwells therein. There is nothing more exciting than coming across a list of American castles and reading there is more to discover, there are more keeps and fortresses and citadels in the secret high places of this land than you had ever dreamed.
I have been to two of them, I think (I feel like the Winchester Mystery House and Scotty’s Castle both deserve to be on this list as well. PERHAPS I SHALL ADD THEM) — Hearst Castle and Rubel Castle, which is, no lie, considered “the Watts Towers of the San Gabriel Valley.” The San Gabriel Valley: never good enough.
There is one called VIKINGSHOLM.
Tags: castles, the internet, wikipedia
That list had better include Excalibur Hotel Resort & Casino in the most American city of them all, Las Goddamn Vegas! An American castle if I’ve ever seen one!
I just looked. It doesn’t 🙁
It seems a folly to exclude it!
ARCHITECTURAL TERMINOLOGY JOKES. I am so, so pleased by this.
Yay for Belvedere Castle in Central Park (spent a lot of time reading/ chilling around there) and Hammond Castle in Gloucester is the shit (lots of happy memories and good pics from a college trip there)
What qualifies a building to be called a castle, as opposed to a mansion for example?
We can solve this question through the democratic Wikipedia process. Just add the mansions and see if anybody deletes them.
Crenellations. Crenellations are crucial.
Also a drawbridge.
I’d argue you can get by without a drawbridge if you compensate with concentric gatehouses or massy oak portals. But yeah, it ain’t a castle without those crens.
Arrow loops and murder-holes are gravy.
I want a portcullis. Like, the size of my regular door, but made of oak and iron.
Turrets are necessary.
edit: apparently it’s the fortification aspects that make it castle-tastic, so defensive structures are key!
I would also like to know this because Castillo de San Marcos is on the list, and that is definitely a fort and not a castle.
Yeah, what the heck, Eastern State Penitentiary is on here, too.
I think the fort/castle line is blurry at best. Officially I think castles had to be inhabited by nobility, maybe?
“Most cannot properly be described as true castles. They are primarily country houses, follies, or other types of buildings built to give the appearance of a castle.”
Totally arbitrary in terms of the Wiki list, it seems.
Here in America we play it fast and loose with our fortified noble-houses
I’m going to put some turrets on my fire escape and call my apartment a castle. We truly are FREE here.
According to the Boldt Castle (or Singer Castle, can’t remember) tour guides, it must have a tower, dungeon, and a moat. Both of those castles have things that technically qualify, although a moat is somewhat redundant when your castle is already on an island.
VIKINGSHOLM I BEEN TO VIKINGSHOLM there’s a little cottage out on the lake you take a boat to and it is RIDICULOUS.
Hey, my cousin got married at Fairlane! I wouldn’t call it a particular castle, I would mostly call it “a big rambling house with no air-conditioning and open to the bugs on a July night,” though.
Also I’ve been to Henderson Castle in K’zoo and it is NOT a castle, it is “a big expensive Queen Anne mansion with stone on the outside.” No castle.
After extensive* research, can confirm that Henderson Castle does not meet castle fortification requirements, unless the whole place can lock down in the event of zombies/intruders/youths.
*wikipedia
The wikipedia list does name this glorious abomination in my parents’ neighborhood but its description is woefully incomplete. When the original guy was there he’d grumpily allow passersby in to take a look around (it’s exactly as made of random garbage on the inside as the outside) and he ran a shop slash giant unsorted pile of random curios and cheap Pakistani swords out of it. It was magical.
It is also no longer the only, or I think even the biggest, castle in town, although it is probably still the best equipped to pour hot oil on the Humungus.
Oh my GOD that entire thing is amazing. Blastproof survivalist romantic bed and breakfast, complete with grumpy castle builder/chef! I WANT TO GO TO THERE.
I’ve only been* to Gillette Castle, on the Connecticut River.
Built from local fieldstone over a five-year span (1914-19), the castle is the loving creation of celebrated actor and playwright William Hooker Gillette, best known for being the first man to bring “Sherlock Holmes” to the stage. With Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s blessing, he gave the character his iconic deerstalker cap, pipe and catchphrase “Oh this is elementary, my dear fellow,” (which was later bastardized into “Elementary, my dear Watson”). He performed as Holmes over 1,000 times, amassing a tidy little fortune in the process…
A Connecticut native and typical pragmatic Yankee, Gillette designed the entire edifice himself, including the 47 doors, each of which has a unique wooden puzzle lock that he also devised. The castle also has all sorts of unique and quirky features, such as a disappearing bar (used extensively during Prohibition) and a set of mirrors that let the voyeuristic Gillette see down into the main room of the castle from his own bedroom (so he could see when guests arrived and could make the proper “grand entrance”).
*(Unless the Medieval Times in Schaumburg counts)
I made a paper mache version of Gillette Castle for a local history project in 4th grade. Luckily Gillette Castle is kind of a mess, so my shoddy work looked intentional.
Medieval Times! The most romantic place to take your date in the NW suburbs junior year is, alas, the only castle I’ve been to in the US. In my heart it will always count as a true American castle.
DELIGHTED to see that my own town’s “Castle Post” aka Martin Castle but mostly just known as “is that a fucking castle? why?” is on the list–built by some dude for his wife, she divorced him before it was done, it sat around for a while, somebody bought it and renovated it, it halfway burned down, they re-renovated it, and now it’s some ritzy-ass cheesetastic hotel that I want to go gawp at but it is not open for tours because the owners are butts. I’m holding out for someone to get married there so I can get in without paying.
edit: built by some dude for his wife in 1969. Important.
Is that outside Lexington? I think I’ve been past it!
Absolutely, close enough to the airport to really disorient visitors. Horse farm, horse farm, racetrack, horse farm, castle?, horse farm…
Yep, that’s the one!
OMG I drove by that once while visiting my sister in Kentucky! If I’m not mistaken, it was on sale for like $2m.
Ahh! I can remember my parents making us pile into the car to go check it out when we first moved to KY.
Maybe you could pretend to want to book a wedding there?
…genius
You could milk that sort of visit for SO MUCH.
P.S. Love the usage of “gawp.”
California has Hearst Castle, Scotty’s Castle and the Winchester Mystery House, leading many a student of California History to believe that rich people go crazy, and thus need to pay higher taxes for mental health reasons
Woo, it has Kzoo’s Henderson Castle! I’ve taken a tour there – I it used to be open for tours on Halloween night, but I’m not sure if it still is. There was a hot tub on the roof. It was also an unsuccessful B&B for a while.
the winchester mystery house is definitely more of a castle than the armory in the mission, which is for some reason on this list.
Technically, since Kink.com became its tenants, the armory has become more of a fuck-church.
I’m ok with the Armory being included simply because it’s likely the only “castle” on the list currently housing a porn production company.
One of my castles* has a photo on the Wikipedia page!
*One of the 2 (2!!!!) castles in my hometown. Luckily, the photo dates from before they built this enormous and god-awful visitor’s center that obscures the front 🙁
Also, Coral Castle is one of my particular favorite American castle stories, and I want to go visit. It’s full of INTRIGUE, and also probably alien powers.
Reverse magnetism! Well I’m sold.
Did someone reverse the polarity again? I hate that.
Oh my god there is a castle in Worcester I grew up in Worcester County how did I not know this oh my god!!
Bancroft Tower? It’s tiny, but pretty. Sadly, you can’t climb around inside. There’s a nice view too, when the hill below it isn’t all overgrown.
I am a spoiled european, vilely and disgustingly spoiled – there are so many castles, in various states of repair, within a 3 hour drive that I cannot be bothered to visit them all. There is a castle that was a prison and is now a museum a 10 minute bus drive from me. It has ghosts and carvings from long-dead prisoners on the walls, and a gallery given over entirely to decorative teapots.
SPOILED.
You are not welcome in this thread
I’m sorry.
If it makes you like me again, you can have a look at the pictures of the castle I did visit recently.
Baconsthorpe Castle https://www.flickr.com/photos/gingerbiscuit/11499…
Fifteenth century! That is older than all of our castles. Put together.
You may stay if you say nice things about our odd American castles, such as they are.
They are charming, every single one.
(but 15th century isn’t even that old, Norwich Castle is Norman, and the first building there starting around 1100)
I will leave a sneaky pic of Edinburgh castle and run away in solidarity with my fellow Brits.
Here is a map of castles in east anglia. So many. So many.
http://www.ecastles.co.uk/anglia.html
I have spent many a delighted hour in that teapot gallery.
(well, at least a couple)
There’s a castle near where I live, but I’ve never been to it. The Dutch don’t have the same volume of castles as some European countries, but there are some. For this one, some Dutch aristocrat married a Rothchild in the 1890s and restored the ruin he inherited to ludicrousness.
Also Wikipedia seems to be calling some things that are clearly weirdly-shaped houses castles.
According to upthread, all you need to technically have a castle are a tower, a dungeon, and a moat, so Drakensteyn has a legitimate shot! Bizarrely enough.
Once dentists started building them, they lost their charm for me. I’d rather bounce around a Medieval pile of mossy rocks in the Black Forest, that was once a castle smaller than the duplex I live in— and that was actually a castle, than wonder at the self-aggrandizing habits of orthodontists.
Though, I suppose there’s some kind of strange symmetry between straightening teeth and building a castle, it’s a bit much to build a castle on Camelback Mountain in a libertarian wasteland— lords in the shape of orthodontists cannot be taken seriously.
Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side in Manhattan exists because…I *think* it was because there used to be an old historic armory on the site or something? And by the time they got around to winning the historical preservation battle, the other dudes were like, whoops, knocked it down already! So they compromised by building something that looked *just like the old armory.* So now there is a high school with windows narrow enough for…archers, I guess.
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/facilities/repository/…
Yes, it was used in The Fisher King movie. Was watching it with my then-husband who started out of his chair and yelled, “That’s my SCHOOL!” Totally blew the movie for him.
Ha. I didn’t appreciate how weird it was until later.
I used to be OBSESSED with Boldt Castle. I think I just found the story of its construction and unfinished state really romantic as a kid.
TBH I liked it better before they really got underway with the “restoration,” as of a few years back they have the entire ground floor and part of the second floor done. It incorporates a lot of the Boldt family furniture that was put in storage, but I found some of the other decor pretty cheap-looking.
Improbably enough, there are a few castles I know of in Austin, Texas, and none of them are on this list.
♪♬American Castle, mama, let me beeeeee…♪♬
I’ve been to Squire’s in Ohio. WHOLELY DISAPPOINTING. Here’s hoping the other castles on this list have stepped it the heck up.
The town neighboring mine growing up had a castle that was appears to be on the market for a cheap $4.3 million! Which is kind of hilarious, considering they tried to sell the thing a few years back for like $28 million. Hopefully they’ve installed a lightning rod, because the place practically burned down a few years back when lightning hit the turret.
Hawai’i:
Iolani Palace Barracks… maybe? http://www.fmschmitt.com/travels/Hawaii/Hawaiian-…
I think that should qualify!
VIKINGSHOLM IS FUCKING AWESOME. I used to go to Tahoe a lot when I lived in Northern California, so I’ve been several times. Trufax: it was built *around* the trees. That trees not be disrupted was a design constraint specified by the eccentric wealthy heiress who built the place, bless her.
Aww, the castle at my high school hasn’t made the list! It was a replica of a British castle some rich dude built for his English wife AND had prohibition-era bootlegger’s tunnels.
One of these castles is APPROXIMATELY TWO MILES from me, and I had no idea that it existed!
jealous
so jealous
I wanted to angrily protest that a castle is not a castle if it was built in the 1970s, but then I noticed there are no castles in my midwestern state and JEALOUSY REARS
WHERE IS MY AMERICAN UPPER MIDWESTERN CASTLE is House on the Rock supposed to satisfy my needs??? should I be rallying around that??? Where do I go in the event of invasion???
SOS UPPER MIDWESTERNERS PLEASE ADVISE
oh nevermind i just needed to think outside the box
THE ICE BOX
We’re supposed to expand this list by building more castles, right?
I just kept wanting to add White Castle. Is that wrong?
No. It’s not wrong at all.
The most American castle of all.
.
My family castle which my ancestors unfortunately sold when they went bankrupt (the Forsters). Yay castles!
This delightful castle is missing from the Wikipedia list. The middle part was originally the water tower for the neighborhood! An eccentric architecture professor “borrowed’ the gothic windows from a demolition project at the university. It even has a ghost- some woman allegedly drowned in the well that supplied the water tower on her wedding night… (To be fair, it’s a very small castle).
Wait..I found an entire list of Austin castles: <a href=”http://www.austin360.com/news/entertainment/arts-theater/downtown-austin-castle-shelters-prestigious-past-1/nRpzp/” target=”_blank”>http://www.austin360.com/news/entertainment/arts-theater/downtown-austin-castle-shelters-prestigious-past-1/nRpzp/
Jim Bishop has been building Bishop Castle by hand for decades and it’s a very strange place. There’s a dragon’s head on the top that allegedly breathes fire, a moat, donated stained glass, a terrifying wrought iron staircase that goes to a rotating onion dome on top, an outside elevator that travels along a 45-degree slope, and other impressive features. It’s huge.
Also, the place is full of huge pieces of plywood covered in intense, semi-comprehensible hand-written screeds about police conspiracies, whether the government is allowed to make you have a driver’s license (not according to Jim!), and similar topics. He does use the word “sheeple.”
Bizarre/offensive omission of Mars’ Cheese Castle. Also all Medieval Times.
One day we’ll be able to add Toast Castle to that list. One day.
Do White Castles count? http://www.whitecastle.com/locations/all
Looks like it's Boldt Castle on Heart Island, which is up in the 1000 Islands region just outside Alexandria Bay.
Oh, it's very pretty, thanks for your due diligence!
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