The Castle Down the Street

Six doors down from my mother’s childhood home was a castle, with a carriage house at the gate. As it was still the home of my grandmother during MY childhood, I had many occasions to pass by and daydream about what it might be like to live in a castle. The property was surrounded by a six or seven-foot high brick wall, and a clever and limber child (I remain clever, but not so limber) could shimmy up the wall and peer over into the property. If you walked around the corner, you could peer through the iron entrance gates, although the view of the house was blocked by the carriage house from this angle.



By my time the house had been long abandoned – and before I was quite an adult, it had been carved up and made part of a soulless condominium development. Occasionally, pre-development, there would be a car parked outside the house, and all the neighborhood children would become very excited at the prospect that someone was moving in, or even better, that the mysterious long-absent owners had returned from their years-long world travels and come home to live out the rest of their days.



Code Dependent snuck into the house once – I can’t recall all the details, but I’m going to go ahead and make up a story, and say she snuck in there to make out with a boy. If I recall her report correctly, there were still plenty of fine draperies and the like, even though the house was unlived in.

The entire neighborhood, including my grandmother’s house, was built along the crest of a hill that gently sloped down toward the Scioto River. The owner of the castle was Sylvio Casparis, who founded the Casparis Stone Company in 1892, which merged with three other companies to become the Marble Cliff Quarries in 1913. The quarries could be seen from the top floor of the castle, so he could keep tabs on any shiftless laborers to make sure they were earning their penny a week.

Barely a stone’s throw from the castle was the home of Samuel Prescott Bush, ( yes, THAT Bush – he was W’s great-grandpappy). He was president and general manager of Buckeye Steel Castings Company (Buckeye Steel) on Columbus' south side (external and internal views on the right).


The home, built in 1908, was sold in 1929 to Detroit socialite Anna Dodge Dillman, the wife of Columbus-born silent film actor Hugh Dillman and widow of Horace Dodge, founder with his brother John of the Dodge Automobile Company. Mrs. Dillman (inset, lower left), the wife of Columbus-born silent film actor Hugh Dillman and widow of Horace Dodge, founder with his brother John of the Dodge Automobile Company. Mrs. Dillman was one of the country's wealthiest women in the mid-1920s, and with Horace built the splendid Rose Terrace home in Grosse Pointe Michigan. Mrs. Dillman bought the Bush home for her husband's family to live in, and in the late 1940s sold it to the Carmelite nuns. By my day, the original house had been incorporated into St Raphael's Home for the Aged, but the home has since moved and the house is being developed for a dreaded condo development.

My grandmother’s house was built on property that had once belonged to the Aladdin Country Club, and the former site of the clubhouse was in the woods just behind her house. The indentation of the clubhouse’s foundation could still be seen, as well as the circular gravel drive seen in the picture below.



Of course, the woods, foundation, and circular drive are all gone now....condos. Not to mention, my junior high band teacher bought my grandmother's house and has built it up so that you couldn't even get to the woods if they WERE there.

If you’re waiting for this all to tie into some profound analogy to my life, stop holding your breath. I just found the pictures online and have nothing better to do.