Searles Castle
Near Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Behind a long stone wall on Main Street rises Searles Castle, a French chateau of stone and marble that looks utterly out of place in a New England town. It was built in the late eighteen eighties for Mary Sherwood Hopkins, the fabulously wealthy widow of Mark Hopkins, a founder and treasurer of the Central Pacific Railroad. When Mark died he left Mary an enormous fortune.
She hired a much younger interior decorator named Edward Searles to design her homes, and their working relationship became something more. Although she was about sixty nine and he was in his forties, the two married in eighteen eighty seven. Originally called Kellogg Terrace, the mansion holds around forty rooms across more than fifty thousand square feet, with dozens of fireplaces and a secret stairway linking their bedrooms.
Building it took several years and a fortune. When Mary died in eighteen ninety one, she left most of her fortune to Searles, sparking a famous legal battle with her adopted son. Today the castle survives as a private property, a Gilded Age fantasy hidden in the Berkshire hills.
