Castle Craftsman Withstands Long State Siege

Soaring above the tall pines on the slopes of 12,000-foot Cuerna Verde are the towers of the Castle of the Golden Hours, one man’s citadel of nonconformity.

But the dragons are at the gate again.

“This is the only fighting castle left in the world,” said Jim Bishop, who over 27 years single-handedly built the castle of granite rocks, steel and concrete without blueprints, building inspectors or permits.

“It has been under siege but won all its battles so far,” said Bishop, a visionary--perhaps eccentric--craftsman with a wrought-iron shop in Pueblo.

The attacking dragons have been bureaucrats from the state highway and tax departments.

The highway department didn’t like Bishop’s highway signs giving directions to the castle, about 16 miles northwest of Rye and about 25 miles southwest of Pueblo. After much acrimony, there now is a state-approved sign pointing to the site.

Property taxes were another major battle. Bishop’s wife, Phoebe, won a property-tax exemption for the castle by setting it up as a nonprofit corporation that pledged part of the donations to help newborns with heart trouble.

Another dragon looms on the horizon, a proposed amendment to impose property taxes on certain nonprofit entities. Colorado voters will vote on it in November.

“That may be the last straw,” Bishop groaned.

“It’s all free. It ain’t costing the state of Colorado a penny. I don’t have no grants, just the donation box.”

The 5-foot-3 Bishop has a dragon of his own to hold attackers at bay. Jutting out from the third-story gable is a gargoyle hammered and welded from surplus hospital stainless-steel dinner plates. Someday it will shoot fire from its mouth and smoke from its flaring nostrils, Bishop says.

Sixty thousand people sign the guest register each year, Bishop says. He lets civic groups and 4-H clubs use the castle for fund-raisers, bake sales and Halloween spook nights. Seventeen weddings have been held in the Great Hall.

After a recent storm, a busload of tourists and several cars stopped on Colorado 165 at the small sign pointing to the castle. The curious broke through 17 inches of fresh snow up the trail to the granite structure, its flying buttresses spreading to the four points of the compass.

“Fantastic,” was a common reaction.

Later, they toured the 2,500-square-foot Great Hall on the third floor, with its soaring cathedral ceiling and louvered glass and wrought-iron windows rising from floor to gable.

The ground level still has a dirt floor, and the second floor will someday be a museum. There are two towers, the 160-foot bell tower and a shorter one called “Dad’s Tower.”

After climbing the dark bell tower’s spiral staircase, made all the more treacherous by blown-in snow, 8-year-old Steve Patin of Houston said: “It’s really scary, really frightening when you go up to the top of that tower, ‘cause when you look down, it’s ohhhhhh!

“It’s like a real castle.”

“How many people you know want to build a storage shed out in the backyard and haven’t done it in 10 years?” asked Rusty Buller of Pueblo West. “This guy’s building a castle!”

Bishop, 52, a self-professed “zealot for freedom, and a nonconformist,” pleased the crowd with one of his free tirades against oppressive government and taxes.

He then reminded them of the donation box at the castle entrance. Donations have kept the project going, but are also the cause of his latest fears that he will lose his charity status.

As the crowd thinned and people wound their way back to the bus, Bishop admitted that he may be burned out, partly because of a family tragedy.

Eight years ago, his 4-year-old son, Roy, was killed in a tree-felling accident near the castle site while Bishop was up on the walls.

“The loss of a child . . . that’s hard,” Bishop said, looking away. “Been awful hard on my wife. I’d just work and cry.”

Bishop’s other children grew up in the gift shop he built on land next to the castle site. In happier times, they had named the granite structure “Castle of the Golden Hours--time golden spent,” Bishop recalls.

After a time, after the child’s death, his wife and the other children--now 23, 21 and 7--moved back to the family home in Pueblo, near his wrought-iron shop. Their interest in the castle waned and then was gone.

“I still got the vision to see the castle through to completion,” Bishop said, but his eyes dulled and shoulders sagged. He is middle-aged now. Arthritis has weakened his shoulders.

And why did it begin?

As a teenager he had helped his parents buy the land. His father wanted a one-room stone cottage for weekend retreats in the Wet Mountains northwest of Rye.

“Passing fishermen started calling it a castle. That’s what inspired me. It dawned on me I could build a castle,” Bishop said, and the light blazed back in his dark eyes.

He worked on the castle on weekends and holidays while living in Pueblo near his workshop.

The builder then spun his dreams of a pipe organ at the east end of the Great Hall, of wrought-iron balconies for picnics and concerts, of a steam-driven power generator and a glass and wrought-iron elevator to the Great Hall, of bells in the bell tower.

And a gatehouse and drawbridge and 16-foot stone wall around the 2.5-acre castle site.

And a moat?

“Let the state build that,” Bishop growled. “And a parking lot.”