6/20/18: It is hard to believe that we left home 100 days ago! Yet, oh the adventures that we have had, the things we have seen, the places we’ve visited, and the people that we’ve met along the way – it has been fabulous! And to think… nearly 1/4 of that has been in NEW YORK!? Seriously! This is a big state! But tomorrow, we will bid adieu to New York AND to the United States, as we check in to Canada for a couple of months.
Today was a fun adventure. There are two castles on islands here in the Thousand Islands area. The Boldt Castle is right here in front of us at Alexandria Bay. The other one is Singer Castle on Dark Island, about 10 miles downriver. They have docking facilities at both islands, so we could take Island Girl. But today we decided to just take the tour boat up to Singer, and leave Island Girl here in her little cozy spot. So at 1:30, we hopped on the Uncle Sam Boat Tour with a couple hundred other tourists, and away we went.
On our cruise down the river, we saw all kinds of little islands. This one had a lighthouse on it. We were told that for shipping purposes, the St Lawrence River is divided up into sections. Each section has four lighthouses, and these are check-in points for the ships. Because there are some narrow channels with speed limits, the lighthouses provide an easy reference point for the ship to announce its location, like mile-markers, and also for the authorities to know if they are moving from one location to another too quickly.
I’m just amazed at the little specks of rock that houses have been built upon. And this isn’t the smallest one we saw!
After about 10 miles, we spied our destination. Singer Castle. Frederick Bourne was the fifth President of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, which is where the name “Singer Castle” came from. Mr. Bourne wanted to surprise his wife Emma and their children with an island hunting retreat. Just a little extravagant for a hunting lodge, huh? – There we go with the Guilded Age again! He purchased Dark Island in 1902 and had designed and built the castle originally known as “The Towers”. American architect Ernest Flagg designed the Castle after inspiration from Sir Walter Scott’s novel about Woodstock Castle (1832) in Scotland, complete with lots of secret passageways. The castle is currently owned by a European Investment company, so the only way to see the island and castle is by tour. I love the stone, arches, and turrets!
As we toured the inside, we found that there are bathrooms on each floor in the round turret!
The dining room was used only for dinner. The little vent near the ceiling on the left was actually a peekaboo spot for the servants, where they could look in on the family and guests to see if anything was needed, without intruding.
The wine room was on the main floor. The wine rack was made of terra-cotta, with bottle holes tilted downward just enough to hold the bottle, keep it cool, and keep the cork wet. To the left is a secret passageway to somewhere. We were not allowed to explore the secret passageways on the tour. ☹️
There were Singer sewing machines everywhere. These were being guarded by an armored knight!
Here’s a couple of good shots of secret passageways, going between rooms with stairs up to the next floor. These passageways were everywhere! Almost every room had one. Nearly every bedroom closet had a coat hook that would trigger a door. I thought they were really cool. Kenny thought they were creepy. But then, he used to watch spooky movies and Alfred Hichcock, and I didn’t, so I didn’t think about bad guys creeping around. You actually can book a stay here, which comes with a complete tour of everything, including the secret passageways! “The twenty-eight room castle and the seven-acre island become yours for the evening!”
This was the breakfast room. It had these large arching windows all the way around. To the left you could see Canada, which was only about 50 yards away, and to the right was the U.S. Dark Island sits just on the U.S. side of the border in the middle of the river.
After dinner, the men could retire to this smoking room. It had heads of elk, caribou, moose, and white tail deer on the four walls.
At the windows in the smoking room were little railcar seats and tables, fashioned after the Pullmans, complete with curtains that could be drawn closed for privacy.
Near the ceiling on one wall was a moveable picture. This room had a very high ceiling, and there was mezzanine floor at that level, where the servants could keep an eyeball on things. This was originally to be one of those pictures with the eyes cut out for the servants to look through, but Mr. Bourne thought that was a little too creepy, so the whole picture moved.
While the men were smoking with the critter heads, the ladies came to the wicker room. This was originally more like a garden room, but when Mr. Bourne’s daughter inherited the castle, she had some remodeling done and added a second floor here, so the walls needed to be beefed up, and a supporting wall added. The room originally went all the way to the windows in the next room.
The library had a really great knight standing guard. All of the books in the library are left from all of the previous castle owners. And a cool old phonograph.
Upstairs in the room that the daughter had added, there was some odd stuff. She was pretty independent and like to do her own thing. She had an “ACME appliance”, which was a two burner stove, with a refrigerator below (on the left in the picture). I’m sitting in a light box that was supposed to help do something fabulous.
This was one of the bathrooms. The bathtub was just inside the door from the hallway. As you can see, you had to walk past the bathtub in it’s own little hallway to get to the rest of the bathroom which is in the round turret part of the castle!
This was out back, where there was a grass tennis court, but the original court fence has been removed. You can see right through the breakfast room of the castle.
The tour was just over an hour, and was very informative. I can’t remember a tenth of what our guide told us. The castle was really neat. It has been restored as it was lived in, and most of the furnishings are authentic to the time or original. At one point during the depression, the castle was abandoned and fell into disrepair and was severely vandalized. A religious organization owned it for a time and used it as a retreat center, but it was not well maintained then either. In 2005, the existing investment organization purchased it in order to preserve it and open it to the public for tours. I’m really glad we took the time to go see it. Not only is it a cool building, but the history that goes with it is fascinating. The Guilded Age was a time of displaying affluence and wealth, and it is so interesting to learn about some of the wealthy and how they chose to spend their fortunes.
Tomorrow – another great castle and love story to go with it.