Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Click here for more images and an inside look at Stuart Castle.
In 1952, Wallace Stuart was 18 years old and newly wedded when he asked his bride, Joan, where she wanted to live. She told him she wanted a white house on a hill. “My nickname for her was Princess, and I said, ‘A princess ought to have a castle. Someday I will build you one. I promise,’” Dr. Stuart says. “Well, I am very cautious now about promising anything. I learned my lesson.”
It was years before he could start working on fulfilling his promise. First, there was the football scholarship at Santa Clara that his mother negotiated, fully aware that the family could not afford tuition. “The best thing out of that was they quit football after my second year,” Dr. Stuart recalls. After graduation, he came to St. Louis University to go to medical school and to become a dermatologist.
To fulfill that pledge stated years prior, he started by buying 111 acres outside Eureka that overlooks the Meramec River and was originally owned by George Warren Brown, founder of Brown Shoe Company. Used as a summer residence, the Browns bought it around 1900; they called it Glen Meadowy.
Dr. Stuart spent an entire decade working with his son to gather stone and create the castle. “I developed what [Joan] called was a nose for stone,” he says. Soon he’s rattling off the provenance for one stone after another: St. Martha’s cemetery on Gravois when they had removed hundreds of markers they were getting ready to destroy; stairs from St. Augustine’s; limestone wainscoting from a motel in Carthage, Mo.; stones gathered from Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, and quarries all over Missouri. When the state started putting in Highway 44, Dr. Stuart hauled away 25 loads of stones, 12 feet high, from buildings that had been removed to make room for the road.
“I had patients who had trouble paying their bills and I would get them to clean the stone,” Dr. Stuart says. “You had to get the mortar off.”
During the winter, he plotted and planned the castle. One chimney was inspired by Mount Vernon, the other by Monticello. He trekked to Ireland and Scotland researching. “You went to sleep thinking about castle and you woke up thinking about castle,” Dr. Stuart says.
As soon as the weather warmed, the building resumed. The first step was the 53-tower—put up by Dr. Stuart and his then 14-year-old son, Wally, in a mere eight weeks.
“There is not a stone up there that my son or I didn’t handle at least twice in the process,” he says. Given that the limestone he was using weighed about 150 pounds per cubic foot, and the granite weighed 190 to 195 pounds per cubic foot, Dr. Stuart calculated halfway through the building that he and Wally had each handled 2 million pounds of stone.
As luck would have it, Dr. Stuart’s then father-in-law was a stonemason. He instructed him over the phone. “Behind that stonewall is a 12-inch block wall and 8-inch block wall up higher,” Dr. Stuart explains. “You leave out one and put in an 8-inch block and create a pocket and that is where you put the stone—into that pocket. Then it doesn’t peel apart. Then there is 4-inches of two-by fours, plus the drywall on the inside of the block. The walls are 24-inches thick. We exceeded Union Electric’s gold medallion standards.” To keep the castle cool required 20 tons of air conditioning, Dr. Stuart explains.
The nearly 8,000-square-foot castle encases the Browns’ original 4,500-square-foot summer cottage. Dr. Stuart was as meticulous with the interior as he was with the stone outside. The cabinets are black cherry; the kitchen boasts a fireplace, barbecue and dumb waiter; the master bath has split Michigan fieldstone. On the grounds, he added the caboose from the New York Central Railroad to use as a changing room by the pool.
Dr. Stuart and his family lived in the castle from 1968 to 1982, or until what he calls “The Great American Divorce.” The house was left empty for six weeks, during which vandals did more than $300,000 worth of damage. “I ended up giving it away,” Dr. Stuart says. “It didn’t cover the cost of the building materials.”
The property was sold to another doctor (this time an internist), who told Dr. Stuart that he invested $2 million in the interior. “I don’t believe that but $1 million is possible,” Dr. Stuart says. “He did an awful lot of tile and marble work,”
Now, years later, there are no regrets, no second thoughts. “My parents raised us all to show up, suit up and put out,” Dr. Stuart says. “I set out to do something and I accomplished it.”
Eventually, Stuart Castle went into foreclosure and now it’s on the market. Originally valued at over $2 million, the current price tag is $599,900.
“My philosophy has been that it was a great experience, it was a lot of work, and I kept my word, which meant a lot to me,” Dr. Stuart says. “Winston Churchill said, ‘First we shape our buildings, then they shape us.’ And Winston Churchill was right.”
