Boldt Castle

I don’t know how old I was the first time I went to Boldt Castle, but guess I might have been six. The last time, I’m guessing I was about twelve. In between, there were around three or four times I visited the castle. Don’t hold me to any of these figures, because it’s been a long time since I’ve been there. All I can do is rely on memories. We all know how accurate those are.

Probably the first thing to do is to make sure you know something about this place, Boldt Castle. I don’t know how famous it is, but for many years it was the only castle I’d ever heard of and the only one I’d been to. It was famous to me. I will therefore give you first the child’s memory, forged or woven, whichever you prefer, then I’ll try to tell you what I found when I returned.

First, you need to know that the castle in question is in the part of the world called the Thousand Islands. That means Alexandria Bay, which means it was the St. Lawrence River, near where it connects with Lake Ontario. Lake Ontario, as a lot of people know, is one of the five Great Lakes. Please don’t ask me what the original names of the lakes were, because that was much more complicated and we need to respect that.

So, now that we have the approximate area identified, we have to complete the description. That means we are going to have to mention how the St. Lawrence forms the border between the US and Canada. That’s a big deal, if you’ve never quite been to Canada (except to go halfway across the river in a 14-footer and say, there! I did it!) 

We do have to mention how the river is a mile wide there and maybe a mile deep. At least. The halfway point between the US (New York, if we want to be specific) and Canada is much more memorable than standing in Ecuador by the monument that marks the equator, with a line that lets you put one foot in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere.

The castle, I was referring to the castle. My mother was the one who enjoyed going and I often went each year even though it meant missing a day out in our 14-footer, named Nogeka, fishing with my father. (If you’d like to know the origin of that name, just let me know.) I liked doing both things, but fishing was probably the stronger attraction. That’s another story, though. 

We would drive seven miles in our old station wagon to the dock for the tour, pay the fee, then go by water to see the castle. I was told it had been built on Heart Island, which was obviously far too perfect for a love story. I only found out much later that it was originally Hart Island, but adding a letter made everything much more romantic, I guess. No idea who was responsible for the change.

I remember all the parts of the castle, including the archway, the gardens, the dove-cote, the boathouse. Alster Tower, the gazebo, the Power House where the generator was supposed to be installed, the triumphal bridge that could be raised and lowered, plus the Yacht House on nearby Wellesley island. I knew them and walked them, like countless other visitors did. Stone after stone after stone, I walked. I walked through magic as if it were mist, sad as the day is long because of what happened there. Or rather, didn’t happen.

The things I remember most about Boldt Castle are my mother’s voice saying the words, the places on the tour, and the walls. The interior walls, blanketed by the big, rough stones of the monument to love. A list, a chain, a series of words pointing to the immense emotion that inspired the project around the turn of the twentieth century. A living museum to a life that suddenly was over and brought everything crashing down. 

Cruel twists of fate, monstrous pain, surging through all the empty halls of the main building, bouncing off unpainted, scribbled-on walls that wept. I know the walls wept, because I heard them. I also heard all the ohs that flitted like moths and mouths beneath barren arches, trying to see inside the crates languishing on the floor and leaning everywhere against the labyrinthine structure. It was like watching life about to burst out of them, like they wanted to get up and dance.

Like I said, I was a child, so the simple idea of love was very appealing. I should tell you that my mother was a simple woman whose only need in life was love and family. Why does this sound so sappy, so trite, when I remember it all these years later, as an adult? I wish there were another way to put it, but sentiment is like that. It’s pretty corny, it’s never going to produce good literature or good art, yet it stays with us forever when we’ve known a person who thinks that way. That’s my case, at least.

That’s because Mom was my teacher. She poured every bit of sentimentality she owned into me. Maybe she ruined me for life. No, not maybe. She did, and it’s too late to change that. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that she was honoring the love of George Boldt for his wife every time she went. Maybe she even shed a tear or two for the sad ending to Heart Island, because the wife in whose honor the lavish castle was being built passed away suddenly, of - you guessed it - heart failure. 

Four years of construction halted. Stones abandoned, furnishings all left in their crates. Husband George was a sunken man. Tragic. My mother watching it all, as if she had been the wife honored with her own castle. In a way she was, but even though her husband was also named George and his last name was German, like Boldt’s, she didn’t have her own castle and never would. She didn’t care, because she wasn’t the castle type, plus she already had a home - a big, run-down old brick house with stone floor in the basement. Older by many years than Boldt’s building, but big enough. It didn’t matter that it was rented, that years later, as a widow, she was forced to buy it so the owner wouldn’t kick her out.

It is highly unlikely that anybody ever told me the other things I’m also going to present to you now as memories, but that’s irrelevant. Evidently my imagination sought to supplement history. Were these my ideas or Mom’s? She never left the US, so she might have confused the facts, but I hesitate to blame her. That wouldn’t be fair.

I thought Boldt was German, born in Europe. I also thought that the wife was waiting to come to the US, as a young bride. Her husband had chosen the site because of its sheer beauty. When she passed away, he left everything, turned into a ghost. He succumbed to a broken heart, I surmised. I don’t think I realized he’d made his fortune in the hotel business. I never stayed in a hotel until many years later, and it definitely wasn’t the Waldorf-Astoria or the Bellevue-Stratford. I have never stayed in a hotel with a hyphenated name, even. 

The sad tale of the couple came along on each visit and I always went with the idea of seeing how the monument to love resisted time. We all tried to resist time as well, by using a soft-leaded pencil to inscribe our names on the walls. Going back a year or two later held the challenge of trying to find our scribbled names. All the visitors did it, so it really was a challenge to locate our signatures. I honestly can’t recall if I ever found my old name nor if I’d written anything more than my name. Mostly I see in my memory the web of names and other words writ large, medium, and small on the plastered walls. 

High-rising elegance, barely built, plastered with names, while pillars, mirrors, and elaborate furniture remained in their packing. What were we doing there, disturbing that beautiful oblivion? I always felt we needed to ask permission to barge in like that, amidst the brittle oblivion, the air bearing love and dead sighs from hall to hall. Voyeurs, people who doted on death?

At night, when we had made the short pilgrimage and were back in our simple little camp on the same St. Lawrence, I usually dreamed about the castle. For a day or two I wished there were a way I could put it together, put the lives that had ended so abruptly back together, place the memories in a luxurious case and help the happiness continue. It never happened, but in my dreams Mr. Boldt’s wife arrived at last and took charge of her fair residence.

I should have left the castle well enough alone. Despite its tragic ending, the love that was its foundation survived year after year, sturdy as a rock, etched in time. All those sayings people insist on repeating when they’ve already been used until they’re frayed around the edges - go ahead, apply them to the way I thought about the island. 

My mother was in awe of its meaning, more than the building and its furnishings. You see, she had the love of her life, and felt free to share in the relationships of other people, even strangers. Her own husband loved her every bit as much as George had loved Louise, except he didn’t have much money. My mother’s husband was also named George, though, so they had that in common. (Her name was not Louise.)

I can tell you a whole lot more about the castle, where it was, what we did there, but it probably is irrelevant. I know I was very proud that my state, New York, had a castle. It felt like a real adventure to go so close to the invisible line with Canada and to know that Border Patrol might show up if we looked like we were doing anything suspicious. It felt like tiny supernatural beings accompanied us back to the camp where we were staying for our ten-day vacation. Wee little beings who often populated our nights overlooking the same river and reminded us how fortunate we were to have our little family, even if we could never ever live in a castle.

Now comes the part that I can barely describe, because it was the biggest mistake ever. You see, I wanted to return to the castle, to see how well my memories had preserved the images of the visits. Immediately, at the entry way, I became aware of the blasting sounds of the people around me. I couldn’t hear a thing, because they were all just bobbing their heads, agreeing with the walls. Saying their silence, nodding, impressed by the wealth. 

When I was a little girl, my mother’s quiet voice had filled my ears. Now I know she wasn’t a particularly intelligent woman, hadn’t finished high school, but nevertheless she was a genius at some things. I’ve never acquired her skills. She made the world magic, good, safe - all the things children need from parents. She didn’t do it any special way, she just made it happen. Sometimes I think it happened because she would repeat things, letting me know that good things are worth hearing more than once. I was the good daughter and recorded everything.

That repetition echoed through the halls with each successive visit. Then I made the mistake of going alone, as I’ve just said, as an adult. I heard the people who were screaming bloody murder everywhere. Well, maybe not really screaming, but it sure felt like it with the absence of the soft voice beside me. The only person who looked past the rich tapestries and finely-carved wood to see the people meant to share the island and its river was me, I’m convinced. 

I needed that voice so I could see and hear the sadness, sense the tragedy, not be afraid. It was gone - it being both the voice and the story it told.

When I went back to visit recently, laden (unknowingly) with all the angles and windows where I should have been able to hear Mom’s voice, I was also shocked by how much Boldt Castle looked like a castle. A real one, I mean. Before, I had only been able to detect the idea of a castle, a pale imprint with the boxed forms, many quite large, urging visitors to set them loose from their trappings, where they had been starting somewhere between 1900 and 1904. Now, all glitzy and shiny, it was clearly not the same place. It might look like a castle, but I knew it wasn’t. Not any more.

I had tried to prepare for the return. I did a bit of looking around the internet, and confirmed that Mr. Rich Man was Georg K. Boldt, born in Prussia (which might not have been Germany at all when he was born, in 1851). I found that his wife was born in Philadelphia in 1860, but both her parents were German. I don’t know yet what language the couple used to express their feelings for each other. I hope it was German.

When I went back, thinking I knew more than when I visited as a girl, I found that some traitor to the cause of love had uncrated all the treasures and set them in their proper places. What was even more terrible is that the paint had covered all the messages and signatures we had left. It could have been done in an effort to unite Mr. and Mrs. Boldt or in recognition of the golden feeling that had led to the erection of the buildings. Wishful thinking. The people in charge had just gone too far.

We had been thoroughly erased and a deep antique gold color had taken the place of our silly smudges. I imagine my mother would have preferred to keep the dusty crates as well. You see, the crates and plaster were where we the living spoke to the castle, consoling it and telling it better days would come. We had good imaginations and could picture the finished halls in all their glory. We didn’t need anything else.

Without the objects still sitting and lying around the vast halls, the pain of loss has disappeared. Boldt Castle is no longer the monument to that noble human emotion so well understood by my mother. The scars were once there, bleeding and oozing, throbbing. Nobody could ignore that, nobody wanted to be unaware of it. Now, the castle is more of a monument to wealth. Wow! How could anybody amass such a fortune? Gee, how much did it cost to paint this and probably the heating bill is enormous! Fifteen million dollars just to finish the project! Imagine that!

Well, frankly, I didn’t want to. Imagine that. Because my castle was gone.

On Heart Island now there is just a big building, with guided tours. Nothing out of the ordinary. It was better when Boldt just slid the lock (or had somebody else do it) to the residence he could afford because of his success as a hotel owner. When he slid the lock and walked away. Forever. You could see him doing that when you went there back several decades. You could see his hunched shoulders and the up-down movement of the back of a person who is sobbing as he says farewell to Paradise. 

I might have wondered back then, as a girl, why he didn’t want it for his children, except that I assumed this construction was for a young bride and there was no family yet. I didn’t know that part of the story. I didn’t know if the dove-cote ever held doves or if there were roses in the garden. I didn’t need to know, because I saw them with my own eye-magination.

I am so, so sorry I went back to Boldt Castle. I should have left well enough alone, should have known I would feel so very alone when I went back. No mother or father, nobody who would understand why I was missing the real castle. The castle that George built, not the one produced by the Board of Tourism somewhere. 

It has lost the ability to spawn awe in visitors. When I went back, there were only vulgarly shiny chandeliers and polished, curving railings, baroque mirrors without a single smudge, flocked wallpaper. It has been stripped down of the people whose home it was intended to be.

Mrs. Louise Kehrer Boldt is probably furious to see what has been done to her northern home on the enormous river without consulting her. I would be. I know she’ll never be able to go home again. Neither will I.