Ferguson’s Castle

Juliana Armour Ferguson, a member of the Armour meatpacking family, began assembling land on the steep hillside between East Shore Road and Bay Avenue in the Town of Huntington in 1907. A 1978 Appellate Division opinion that traced the title records that she bought the northwest parcel of the former William Simpson tract that year and that by 1908 she owned three of its four parcels.

The house she built there was called The Monastery. A profile in the August 1917 issue of The Touchstone credited the design of the house to the architect Allen W. Jackson and the garden to Mrs. Ferguson. The magazine described plain concrete walls, a red tile roof with a few green tiles mixed in, a cloister walk around an inner court with a circular pool, Italian well-heads, lions and griffins, and a stairway that ran under the driveway through a tunnel toward the shore road. It also noted that the house was built for a large family of children. Later accounts describe about 40 rooms and a four-story bell tower. Sources disagree on when construction ended: Untapped Cities gives 1911, while a blog history points to architectural publications of the house by 1908.

The same blog history reports that Dr. Farquhar Ferguson died before the house was finished and that Juliana Ferguson died in 1921. It says the estate later served briefly as a girls' school and then passed to the Buffalo publisher William J. Connors and later to Charles Cords. Untapped Cities reports that Charles D. Cords, a Brooklyn attorney, lived there for about 30 years but could not keep up with the taxes. By the 1960s the house, by then widely known as Ferguson's Castle, was vacant and deteriorating, and Suffolk County was considering prospective buyers. Local efforts to find a new use failed, and the house was demolished in 1970.

Castle Associates acquired the former Ferguson land for subdivision and development, as the 1978 court opinion records, and new houses now stand on the estate. A gatehouse and sections of the old estate walls survive along East Shore Road, according to two web sources. Part of Mrs. Ferguson's collection of European art survives in museums. The Cleveland Museum of Art owns a marble capital fragment carved with the Ox of Saint Luke, dated about 1175 to 1200, whose recorded provenance begins with Juliana Armour Ferguson of Huntington.

The estate cannot be visited. The surviving fragments stand on private property, and the main house is gone.