The other day, one of those silly drones was buzzing around the river bluffs near Bee Tree Park, and I had to smile. They wouldn’t find it—the Scottish castle is gone. Nature stormed its walls, and shifting rock meant danger to marauders. Finally the new owner, Ameren—tired of scrubbing graffiti tags off the stone arches and annoyed at having to mend the fence after an amateur film crew tried to make a horror movie there—demolished what remained of the ruins. All that drone could have captured was the castle’s footprint: the stone foundation of the 30-foot walls, the outline of the sunken garden, and the grand stone staircase, all of it mossy and broken, an ugly red electrical tower rising from the middle.
The castle’s creator, George Wood-Smith, was a Scot with a brilliantly inventive mind, an engineer who made and lost millions time and again. He settled in St. Louis and bought 420 acres on which he intended to build a small (by castle standards) replica of his aunt’s castle, near Glasgow. Lady Jane Maxwell (descended from a patron of poet Robert Burns) had favored the aesthetic of Louis XIII; she would have approved the inventive classicism of St. Louis architect Raymond Maritz. By 1914, he’d drawn the castle plans, and for six years, builders and artisans labored. In 1920, Wood-Smith ran out of money. Oh, the whispers said otherwise—a child’s tragic fall, a misbegotten love affair—but the truth was simpler. There were a few bursts of construction when Wood-Smith was flush again, but the nation’s Great Depression sealed his own.
A resilient chap, he still managed to live with a flourish, building a nine-hole golf course to amuse friends and inveigling the captain of the Goldenrod showboat to moor at his landing and entertain guests. Though he ran out of cash, he never ran out of dreams; at age 68, he started a new career, earning a teaching certificate and going off to a boys’ home in Boise, Idaho, to work as a vocational instructor. He had, as his son said, “a keen mind that wouldn’t grow old.”
The land’s now called Castle Bluff. The house where the Wood-Smiths lived so elegantly with their children and Russian wolfhounds while waiting for the castle is a little shabby, used by a country club for storage. Kids from Mehlville High School used to hold graduation parties up at the castle, and in the moonlight, as one young man put it, even “the [Union Electric] plant looked like an ocean liner on the river.”
Today, all that’s left is the story of a castle unkept, its outline protected by a fence and a moat of memories.
