Hearthstone Castle

The following information is courtesy of Damned Connecticut.
The once-proud Hearthstone Castle sits abandoned in Danbury's scenic Tarrywile Park, a forgotten edifice now boarded up and home to tangled weeds and various opportunistic critters. Seeing it today, you'd be hard-pressed to believe that it once was shiny and new—yet it was over a century ago.
In 1897, E. Starr Sanford, a very successful New York City-based portrait photographer from an affluent Danbury family, decided to have a lavish summer home built. For whatever reason, the family only lived there for five years before selling it in 1902 to industrialist Victor Buck, who renamed it Buck's Castle—you know, because turn-of-the-century industrialists named everything after themselves (see Hearst, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc.). In 1918, Charles Darling Parks, a self-made millionaire who was president of the American Hatters and Furriers Co., bought it from Buck for his daughter Irene Parks, and renamed it Hearthstone Castle—conjecture is that it got that name from the eight fireplaces found throughout the structure, all made of stone. It stayed in the Parks family for nearly 70 years.
In 1985, the castle, neighboring Tarrywile Mansion and the surrounding acres were bought for $4.7 million by the city of Danbury. Unfortunately, since then, the town has not been able to maintain—let alone renovate—the castle, letting it tumble into its current state of decay. Walls have crumbled, ceilings have fallen; to put it succinctly, it's a mess. In May 2008, five Ridgefield teenagers were arrested for vandalizing the castle after they brilliantly posted a video of themselves wrecking the place on YouTube.
As you might imagine, in its heyday, the castle was quite the showplace. The three-story structure had 17 rooms, including nine bedrooms, a library and a billiard room. (No mention if there was a secret passage from the study to the kitchen, or if anything untoward happened to Colonel Mustard with a candlestick.) Although the exterior was fashioned from local stone, the interior wood was all imported from Italy. Apparently, the entire castle was also capable of producing its own electricity.
It is on the National Register of Historic Places as well as the Connecticut Register of Historic Places. Various local groups have tried to rally to save it, but as of right now, there are no concrete restoration plans.

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