Chateau Laroche, The Castle Harry Built

On the east bank of the Little Miami River just north of Loveland stands a medieval castle built by one man over more than fifty years. Harry Andrews was a World War One army medic who fell in love with the castles of France while serving there. He contracted spinal meningitis overseas, was declared dead, and woke up six months later to find his fiancée had married someone else.

He came home to Ohio, became a Boy Scout troop leader, and in nineteen twenty-seven began building Chateau Laroche by hand on a riverbank plot, using thousands of quart-sized milk cartons as molds for concrete bricks and carrying countless pailfuls of stone from the Little Miami. Construction continued until his death in nineteen eighty-one. Andrews was a medievalist who opposed modern warfare.

He took the name from the Chateau de la Roche in southern France, where he worked after his recovery, and it means Rock Castle. He based the design on a sixteenth century castle but gave it a modern floor plan, with an office, a garage, and a junk room, alongside a dungeon and an imprisonment tower. He described the place as an expression and reminder of the simple strength and rugged grandeur of medieval knighthood.

After he died, a hidden room in the garden, reached through an arch, was found. The upstairs chapel walls hold stones from his travels and from friends abroad. Andrews left the castle to his Boy Scout troop, the Knights of the Golden Trail, who maintain it as a museum and event space today.