Gillette Castle

William Hooker Gillette was born in Hartford on July 24, 1853, and grew up in Nook Farm, the neighborhood his father, the abolitionist senator Francis Gillette, developed with John Hooker. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain lived there too. On November 6, 1899, his play Sherlock Holmes opened at the Garrick Theatre in New York and ran for 235 performances. He went on to play Holmes about 1,300 times.

The National Register nomination for his house credits Gillette, not Arthur Conan Doyle, with popularizing the deerstalker, the Inverness cape, and the calabash pipe. ConnecticutHistory.org calls the pipe a curved briar, and it credits him with the line "Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow," which Clive Brook, the first film Holmes, later trimmed to "Elementary, my dear Watson."

Seventh Sister

In 1913, Gillette began stepping back from the stage and building a retirement estate on the southernmost of a chain of seven hills south of Middletown. He named it Seventh Sister and insisted it was not a castle. Informally, it was "the pile of rocks." He supervised the work from his houseboat, the Aunt Polly, moored at the foot of the bluff.

Twenty men took five years, from 1914 to 1919, to build the main house: 24 rooms of local fieldstone over steel floor joists. The Hartford firm Porteus-Walker, founded by his childhood friend Robert Porteus, turned Gillette's sketches into working drawings and made the woodwork in its own shop. The Friends of Gillette Castle put the cost at $1.1 million. The National Register nomination describes the exterior as "a fanciful recreation of a crumbling Gothic ruin." Don Goss, the park supervisor, told the Hartford Courant in 1998, "He told builders he wanted it rougher and rougher and rougher. What he wanted was a castle that looked like a ruins." He added, "This leaks like a sieve."

The doors and the bar

Each of the 47 doors has its own latch, carved from wood. Connecticut Magazine counted 66 carved doors in 2002. The light switches are large wooden toggles, and the dining table slides out from the wall on a fixed track, as does the chair at his desk.

The bar cabinet closes with a trick wooden lock. The Courant reported in 2002 that Gillette would leave guests in the bar room and watch them try to open it through mirrors placed around the house. The Friends say he watched from the second-floor balcony. The SPACES archive of artist-built environments says he watched from his bedroom. Restorers also documented a secret tower room and a hidden passageway, and the Courant described a room in one wall where he could hide from anyone he wanted to avoid. The same paper names Charlie Chaplin, Helen Hayes, and Albert Einstein among his guests. The Boston Globe reported in 2023 that he kept 17 cats.

The railroad

Around 1927, Gillette laid about 3 miles of 15-inch track around the estate, with switches, trestles, bridges, a tunnel, and two stations. The Friends put the cost at $50,000. In a newsreel from the late 1920s, he said, "People didn't tell me that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I've often heard that I was born with a steam engine in my mouth. And at last, I've got one." Wilson Brownell, 76, who had ridden the train, told the Courant in 1998, "He was proud of his train, and away we went!"

The Aunt Polly burned at its mooring on December 20, 1932, and the cause was never determined. When rumors said Gillette had set the fire for the insurance money, he answered in the local paper that it could not be true "owing to the fact that there was no insurance. I did not think of it in time." The wreck became a state archaeological preserve in 2003, and more than 100 feet of hull shows when the river is low.

The will

Gillette died in Hartford on April 29, 1937, at 83. The will he signed at Saybrook on January 27 asked his executors to sell the estate to someone who would appreciate its mechanical features. He wrote that it would be "more than unfortunate for me" if he found himself "doomed, after death, to a continued consciousness of the behavior of mankind on this planet" and saw his walls, railroad, and locomotives "in the possession of some blithering saphead who had no conception of where he is or with what surrounded."

On October 15, 1938, the estate sold at auction for $35,000, and the executors rejected the bid. In 1943, the State of Connecticut bought it with help from the Connecticut Forest and Park Association, for $30,000 by the Friends' and the Courant's account. Wikipedia gives $29,000. The park opened on October 7, 1944. The train went to the Lake Compounce amusement park the same year the state bought the estate. The electric engine has since come back and sits in the Visitor Center, and on June 14, 2025, the restored steam engine, its tender, and one passenger car were installed on the Visitor Center's porch.

Asked by the Boston Globe in 2023 whether Gillette's ghost stayed on, a docent, Sarah Lucey, said she had felt nothing but another guide had. "If he is floating around, he's definitely happy," she said.

The leaks

In September 1998, the state closed the castle because of leaks. The Courant reported that staff set out 30 to 40 buckets whenever it rained, and that water damage had left parts of the roof close to collapse. The castle reopened on Memorial Day weekend 2002, after a restoration the Courant put at $11.5 million and the AP, a year earlier, at $10.1 million. The architect, David Barkin, found mortar tinted mustard, green, red, black, and burgundy. "We think his intent was to have the look of a dry-laid wall with no mortar," he said.

The castle is seen on timed, self-guided tours of about 1 hour, starting every 15 minutes from 10am, with last entry at 4pm. Each slot takes 18 people and often sells out, so it's worth booking ahead on ReserveAmerica (a processing fee applies) or buying at the castle on arrival. Tickets are $6 for ages 13 and up and $2 for ages 6 to 12. Children 5 and under, and holders of the Charter Oak Pass (Connecticut residents 65 and older) or the Heritage Pass, get in free but still need a ticket. Only the first floor is wheelchair accessible.

Tours run daily from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, then on weekends and holidays through Columbus Day, which falls on October 12 in 2026. The castle then closes until its holiday tours, held Friday through Sunday between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 10am to 3:30pm.

The grounds and parking are free and open daily from 8am to sunset all year. The Visitor Center holds Gillette's restored electric locomotive, with the steam engine on its porch. The Train Trail follows the old railroad bed for about 1.1 miles, and a 1.5-mile route on the Train and Blue trails passes through the unlit 75-foot tunnel to the house of Gillette's valet, Yukitaka Osaki, and to the Aunt Polly wreck, which shows best at low tide. A flashlight helps in the tunnel. There is no food service in the park.

The year-round route is Route 82 over the East Haddam Swing Bridge. The Chester-Hadlyme Ferry, whose Hadlyme landing is about a 15-minute walk from the castle, runs April 1 to November 30, but the state suspended it for repairs on September 8, 2026, so it's worth checking CTDOT's alerts before planning on it.