Searles Castle (Massachusetts)

 

Searles Castle (Massachusetts)

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Searles Castle
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Searles Castle
Location	Main St., Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Area	64 acres (26 ha)
Built	1883
Architectural style	Renaissance, Other, Chateauesque
Governing body	Private
NRHP Reference #	82004953[1]
Added to NRHP	April 15, 1982

The Searles Castle is a romantically imagined castle-style house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Built in the 1880s, and in the French chateau-style, it has seven stories and includes a "dungeon" basement. There are 40 rooms containing over 60,000 square feet (5,600 m²) of floor space, as well as 36 fireplaces.

It was commissioned in 1888 by Mary Hopkins, widow of railroad millionaire Mark Hopkins. She married Edward Francis Searles, who had designed the interior, while the castle was being built. Hopkins died in 1891, but Searles maintained the castle until his death in 1920. After his death, the structure was used as a private girls' school for 30 years. It then passed through a variety of owners and uses, including as a storage area and conference center.

Since the mid-1980s it has housed John Dewey Academy, a school for troubled teens, which put the castle on the market in 2007 for $15 million.^[2]