Hearthstone Castle

Architect Ernest G. W. Dietrich designed the house — three stories, nine bedrooms, library, billiards room, eight stone fireplaces, with a carriage house, caretaker's cottage, pump house, water tower, and machine shop. Dietrich went on to collaborate with Gustav Stickley on the first Craftsman cottage in 1903, which makes Hearthstone the work of a man who helped invent two opposite ideas of the American house. Construction ran from late 1895 to June 1899.

Victor Buck, a retired New York industrialist, bought it in 1902 and renamed it Buck's Castle, using it summers for two decades. In 1918 Charles Darling Parks — who had bought the neighboring Tarrywile Mansion in 1910 — purchased the castle as a wedding gift for his daughter Irene, and the name Hearthstone stuck, probably for the eight stone fireplaces. Irene Parks Jennings occupied it until her death in 1982 — sixty-four years, the castle's longest tenancy; her heirs sold the estate to the City of Danbury in 1987, the same year it entered the National Register of Historic Places.

Under city ownership the castle was not maintained; the roof and interior floors collapsed, and the building began drawing the population ruins draw. A 2008 task force studied rescue options, and the mayor has been blunt about the interim problem: short of parking a police officer outside around the clock, kids break in, people get stuck, and at least one fire has been set. The living, in other words, provide most of the documented activity. The haunting file is thinner and sits on top: shadow figures reported in the window openings, a woman said to appear in the tower, lights and movement described by people who were trespassing at the time.

The castle predates Connecticut's more famous Gillette Castle by roughly twenty years, which gives the file a small archival satisfaction: the earlier castle is the one that became a ruin.

Danbury has put more than a million dollars into stabilization and rehabilitation, with plans to convert the shell into an observation deck. The record is a photographer's romantic gesture that his wife declined to love, a mansion turned wedding gift turned ruin. The lore is whatever trespassers carry out of a roofless castle at night — which, to be fair to the file, is exactly the population a haunting attracts. A honeymoon cottage its bride disliked, abandoned to blackberry thicket and fencing, will generate stories on its own schedule.