10/23/2026
Loveland Castle in Ohio if you’ve never toured the castle it is pretty neat. I’ve been there several times when I was younger with family and even participated in the haunted castle years ago for the Halloween haunt. It’s amazing how it was built brick by brick years ago. Something pretty neat close to home.
Loveland Castle was built by a Sunday school teacher, fifty-six thousand pails of stone and more than fifty years of work.
Not one of those ingredients is a king.
It looks like it should come with a moat, a royal family and a thousand years of drama. It has the moat, sort of. A dry one. The rest is pure twentieth-century Ohio, built by one stubborn man and a whole lot of buckets.
His name was Harry Andrews, and the people who look after his castle today still call him Sir Harry.
Harry had studied architecture. During World War I he served in the Army Medical Corps, and at one point he was posted to an army hospital in France, at a chateau called La Roche. Remember that name. It comes back.
The way Harry told it, the Army also declared him dead in 1918. By the time everyone figured out he was very much alive, his fiancée had married another man. He stayed on in Europe for a while and toured castles, like a man doing research for a project he hadn't admitted to yet.
Back home in Ohio he worked as a reporter and a teacher, and he ran a Sunday school class that doubled as a Boy Scout troop. Some small lots along the Little Miami River ended up in Harry's hands. Perfect campsite.
The boys kept leaving their gear there, and their stuff kept coming back wet, chewed or gone.
Anyone who has ever sent a kid to camp with a brand new sleeping bag knows this pain personally.
So Harry built two stone tents to keep things safe. That is the moment a reasonable person stops. Harry did not stop.
The boys called themselves the Knights of the Golden Trail. As the Knights tell it, the troop decided they couldn't be real knights without a real castle. Harry made them a deal. If they would haul rocks up from the river, he would build them one.
He broke ground on June 5, 1929, and kept going for decades.
He made the bricks himself by pouring concrete into used milk cartons. The usual tally is about 56,000 pails of stone, carried by hand. Most of that heavy lifting happened after he retired in 1955, which is a very different retirement plan than golf.
The result mixes German, French and English castle styles, with four kinds of towers, a domed ceiling and murder holes. There's even a ballroom, which the Knights describe as a one fifth scale copy of the ballroom Harry used as a field hospital in the war. He named the whole place Chateau Laroche, after that hospital in France.
Told you.
The terraced gardens on the card hold one more surprise. Harry hid a secret room out there, with its entrance tucked into one of the arches. Nobody found it until after his death, when it finally collapsed. Even the Knights didn't know it was there.
Later in life he turned down more than fifty marriage proposals. He was a castle man.
Harry worked on his castle until he died in 1981, at 91. He left it to the Knights of the Golden Trail, and they still own and run it today. Check their current hours before you pack the minivan for a fall visit.
A castle, it turns out, doesn't need a king, a fortune or a thousand years. Loveland got by on one teacher, a troop of boys and fifty-six thousand pails.
And a promise to some kids that he kept for the rest of his life.
