Singer Castle Dark Island
— — a Scottish keep that drifted onto the wrong river.
Not only on a wall.
“The castle stands alone on Dark Island, a five-acre rock in the St. Lawrence between Hammond and Alexandria Bay. Frederick Bourne, president of the Singer Sewing Machine company, had it built between 1902 and 1905 as a sportsman's retreat, modelled after a Scottish keep his architect had been reading about. Tours run by boat from Chippewa Bay through the warm months. The granite walls hold the island like they belong to it.
Singer Castle Dark Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Singer Castle sits on Dark Island, a five-acre granite outcrop in the St. Lawrence River between Hammond, New York and Alexandria Bay. The island lies in the American channel of the Thousand Islands, roughly a dozen miles downriver from the international bridge at Wellesley Island. The castle was built between 1902 and 1905 for Frederick Bourne, the fifth president of the Singer Manufacturing Company, who used it as a hunting and fishing retreat. Today it is owned by Dark Island Tour Inc. and operated as a seasonal historic-house museum reachable only by boat.
Architect Ernest Flagg designed the castle in the Scottish baronial style, taking cues from Sir Walter Scott's 1826 novel Woodstock. The four-storey keep was raised in granite quarried in the Thousand Islands and floated to the site on barges. Flagg, better known for the 1908 Singer Building in Manhattan, built secret passages, a dungeon door, and a clock tower into the plan, along with a tunnel beneath the boathouse. Construction ran to roughly half a million dollars in 1905 currency, an extraordinary sum for a private home at the turn of the century.
Singer Castle is open to the public from mid-May through early October, with guided tours running about forty-five minutes. Access is by boat only: Uncle Sam Boat Tours from Alexandria Bay and Schermerhorn Harbor in Hammond run scheduled crossings, and private boaters may dock at the island's slip with a tour ticket. The castle's two upper bedrooms can be rented overnight in a separate package that includes private after-hours access. Admission and crossing fees apply. Winter access closes once the St. Lawrence ices over and boat traffic ends.