Hammond Castle Museum

John Hays Hammond Jr. was one of the most inventive minds of his age, a pioneer of remote control and radio guidance whose work laid groundwork for modern electronics and guided weapons. He held hundreds of patents and was sometimes called the father of radio control. With the fortune and fame his inventions brought, he set out to build a home that matched his passions for history, art, and experiment.

Between 1926 and 1929 he raised his castle on the Gloucester shore, designing it himself as a stone fortress in the medieval and Renaissance mold. It served as his residence, his laboratory, and a showcase for the European treasures he had gathered on his travels. He and his wife Irene filled it with art and antiquities, and Hammond continued his experiments within its walls, so that the castle was at once a museum, a home, and a workshop of the modern age dressed in the clothing of the old.

Hammond was an avid collector of European art and architecture, and he did more than hang his acquisitions on the walls; he built them into the castle itself. Genuine medieval and Renaissance doorways, windows, columns, and carved stone from Europe were incorporated into the structure, so that fragments of old churches and houses became part of a new building on an American shore, blurring the line between collection and construction.

The centerpiece is the castle's Great Hall, a soaring stone chamber, and its indoor courtyard, designed to evoke a medieval village square complete with a pool and the facades of old buildings. Rooms hold paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and antiquities spanning many centuries, gathered by a man determined to surround himself with beauty from the deep past, all under one dramatic seaside roof.

One of the castle's marvels is its enormous pipe organ, one of the largest ever installed in a private home. Hammond, who loved music and understood acoustics, worked for years to build and refine the instrument, whose thousands of pipes fill the walls of the Great Hall, and the sound in that stone chamber can be overwhelming, a fitting voice for such a place.

The organ was more than a showpiece; it reflected Hammond's genuine fascination with sound and its transmission, of a piece with his inventive career. Today it remains a highlight of any visit, and the castle sometimes hosts concerts and demonstrations that let visitors hear the great instrument fill the medieval-style hall with music, as its builder intended.

The castle sits on Cape Ann, the rocky granite cape north of Boston that has drawn fishermen and artists for centuries. Its home city of Gloucester is one of the oldest seaports in the country, still a working fishing port, immortalized in the Man at the Wheel memorial to lost fishermen and in books and films about the perilous life at sea. From the castle's cliff you look out over the water toward a reef and a lighthouse.

The area is one of the most scenic on the coast, and the castle pairs beautifully with the wider North Shore. The artists' colony of Rockport, with its famous red fishing shack, lies just up the cape, and the beaches, harbors, and historic towns of the region spread out along the shore. Hammond Castle makes a memorable stop on any exploration of this rugged, storied coast.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.