Gillette Castle

Gillette Castle is the ruin an actor built new. William Gillette — the man who gave Sherlock Holmes his deerstalker and curved pipe on stage — designed the 24-room fieldstone fortress himself, raised 1914-1919 on the southernmost of the Seven Sisters hills 200 feet over the Connecticut River. The parapets were built to look half-fallen; the castle was a deliberate fiction, a medieval ruin constructed as a retirement stage set by the most famous Holmes of the American theater.

Everything inside is Gillette's invention — wooden light switches he carved, roll-away tables, mirrors angled to spy on the living room, hidden passages, a door unlocked by a puzzle only he could work. The estate ran to a three-mile narrow-gauge railroad with its own tunnel for ferrying guests, and the trails his guests walked were built with near-vertical steps and stone-arch bridges — the landscape as theatrical as the house.

He guarded it past death — his 1937 will directed that the estate never fall to 'some blithering saphead who has no conception of where he is.' Connecticut bought it in 1943 and made it a state park; 300,000 people a year now climb the hill the actor crowned, walking the railroad bed through the dark 75-foot tunnel, in the castle that was built to look ancient by a man who played a detective and designed every switch.

Gillette Castle is the archive's stage-set file — Sherlock Holmes's American actor building a deliberate ruin over the Connecticut River, trick doors and a private railroad included, safe from the blithering sapheads by his own will.