A castle for the Catskills

Textile baron’s summer retreat still wows

By Edward Lundquist | For Manor Ink

While Europe is well known for its romantic and dramatic castles, there is a place here in our own little corner of the woods that shares in this reservoir of magic: Forstmann Castle, located on the property of the Frost Valley YMCA camp in Claryville. This beautifully and intricately crafted building, encompassing vast grounds and vast vistas, also has a rich family history that makes it a story to share.

Julius Forstmann was the owner of a successful textile business. His factory in Passaic, NJ, produced fashionable woolen clothes, and provided soldiers with uniforms during World Wars I and II. Forstmann’s was one of the first textile companies to use branding tags to demonstrate the status and quality of its goods, compared to the cheap knockoffs which tended to spring up in the early 20th century. Forstmann had immigrated to the United States, at the request of his family, to start up a factory in order to avoid the steep textile tariffs imposed on imports from Germany.

A grand home in the German style

In 1914, Forstmann purchased multiple small farm properties, totalling around 2,000 acres in what is now Frost Valley, for a summer retreat home for his family. Within these grounds, he built a cozy little 29-room, three-story building that included housing for servants in the basement. He enlisted the help of 300 workmen, and 27 teams of horses and oxen to drag supplies from Kingston up over Slide Mountain to the construction site. The structure’s style clearly resembles a German castle, similar to Forstmann’s childhood home in Germany. The castle took two years to complete.

Forstmann cared very much about amenities for his family members and guests. These included vast gardens and lawns, complete with a rose terrace for his wife Adolphine, a pond stocked with fish and ducks, and an ice room to keep food fresh in the warmer months. Forstmann apparently wasn’t much of a marksman, as he had a section of the grounds fenced off and filled with 200 Adirondack deer that could be released whenever he wanted to hunt.

Each room in the Castle is unique and displays the grandeur Forstmann had in mind. Every main room on the first floor has a different type of wood as its focus. The foyer, for example, has white oak walls, with floors made of teak and mahogany. All the floors have no screws or nails, but are held together by butterfly joints and wooden pins, which along with the hard-soft-hard-soft wood patterning allowed for the expansion and contraction caused by changing temperatures.

Forstmann’s study utilized black walnut, stained very dark to give an authoritative and powerful feeling. There he had his desk, bookshelves, and taxidermy pieces – which are also exhibited throughout the house.

The music room is “composed” of bird’s eye maple, a type of wood having a beautiful rolling-and-spotted pattern caused by a certain fungus. The woodwork curves at the ceiling to maximize acoustics. Inside can be found his wife’s Steinway piano. When, late in life, she developed a severe case of arthritis and could no longer play, Forstmann converted the Steinway, one of five that the family owned, into a player piano.

In the living room, the cherry walls were made in such a pattern, with the bottom panels larger than the upper ones, to make Forstmann seem much larger than he was when he entered to greet his guests. Another point of interest are the paintings. There is a famous portrait of Forstmann himself, whose eyes seem to follow the viewer around the room. There is also the “Deer painting,” an attraction for any YMCA camper who ever took a tour of the building. Throughout the day, as explained by the counselors, the sun shines at different angles on the painting, gleaming off the textures in a different way nearly every minute, revealing or concealing more deer throughout the woodland landscape in a simple – and perhaps unintentional – optical illusion.

Summoning servants

Throughout the building, there are small buttons on door frames, under carpets and in bathrooms that were used to call servants when needed by the family and guests. The one in the dining room is hidden under the carpet where Forstmann sat so that he could call in servants during the meal at the “perfect, coincidental time.”

The second floor is devoted to bedrooms, previously for the Forstmann family and their guests, but still in use today. The third floor was where the children slept and played in a large playroom, and could climb an imposing staircase leading to the castle tower.

The tower boasts a view of all the surrounding valley, like an illustration out of a fairytale. Slide Mountain peers over the surrounding peaks and, on the day the Ink visited, a sea of gray trees on a blanket of white snow covered the mountainsides.

Many novel aspects

Among other features, electricity was provided to the house by a coal generator. The house was also one of the first in the country to have a functional elevator, installed in 1951 when Adolphine became wheelchair bound. Intricate detail and care is evident as well on the exterior of the building, including the stacked-stone foundation, with arches and clean corners, the beautiful roofing and picture-perfect window frames and ornaments.

To protect the building from fire, something Forstmann feared, all the floors are built on a six-inch thick steel frame and filled in with thousands of pounds of sand. On top of all that, the lights are concealed by hundreds of small, hand-cut Austrian crystals, strung on a single strand, that were tediously and meticulously cleaned daily by servants. The numerous details of Forstmann Castle make it a treasure and rank it alongside the great European castles.

The castle and grounds were sold by the Forstmann Estate to a New Jersey-based boys camp in 1957, which was acquired by the YMCA in 1968.

Manor Ink greatly appreciated Eliza Gentry of the YMCA for her time, friendliness and knowledge in providing a tour of this historic landmark.

Edward Lundquist is a former associate editor of Manor Ink.