Frank
Bannerman bought an island in the Hudson River in New York to store his
growing stock of military surplus goods and arms. He needed to build a
warehouse anyway, so he made it a castle reminiscent of those he
remembered from his childhood in Scotland, complete with a drawbridge
and a moat. That was 100 years ago, and the castle is still standing
-sort of.
I was frustrated that I couldn’t get closer
than a few hundred yards and peak into the rooms now open to the sky. It
seemed odd that a huge stone structure barely a century old could be in
ruins, but there’s an inherent weakness in all military storehouses:
the contents. The Arsenal was devastated by an explosion of its own gun
powder in 1920. It was injured again in 1969 when peacenik hippies
accidentally started a fire, and then in 2010 when a brutal Catskill
winter collapsed two walls.
The house Bannerman built
for his family is a bit more modest, but still impressive, and
strangely close to the munitions warehouse.
Take a tour of Bannerman’s Castle and the island it sits on at History Buff.
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