Bannerman Castle

It looks like a Scottish castle in the middle of the Hudson. It is a warehouse for surplus weapons.

Pollepel Island is 6.5 acres of mostly rock, uninhabited, about 50 miles north of New York City and roughly 1,000 feet off the eastern bank of the river at the Northern Gate of the Hudson Highlands. Pollepel is Dutch for a pot ladle. The island has been called Pollopel, Pollopel's and Bannerman's, and the castle history published by the family traces the name instead to a legend about a young girl called Polly Pell, romantically rescued from breaking river ice.

That account, written by Jane Bannerman, granddaughter-in-law of the man who built the castle, adds that the island was considered haunted by indigenous tribes and so became a refuge for people trying to escape them, and that Dutch sailors added superstitions of their own. It is a place that has attracted stories for a very long time.

The Revolutionary War left something more solid. Patriots sank 106 chevaux de frise, upright logs tipped with iron points, between the island and Plum Point across the river, trying to stop British ships going upriver. Caissons from several of them still rest on the river bottom. They did not work: a British flotilla got through and burned Kingston in 1777. George Washington later signed a plan to use the island as a military prison, though there is no evidence one was ever built.

The castle came from a Brooklyn business. Francis Bannerman VI was born in Scotland on 24 March 1851 and came to the United States with his parents in 1854; his grandfather had worked as a linenman in Dundee. The family moved to Brooklyn in 1858 and started dealing in military surplus near the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1865. Bannerman needed somewhere to store an enormous quantity of ordnance, and built a castle on an island to do it.

It is a ruin now, and tours run out to it by boat.