Realizing it would be perfect for their munitions storage, David told his father of the location’s merits Frank agreed. It was in early 1900 when son David was canoeing along the Hudson and first spotted Pollepel, just off the eastern shoreline. Native Americans reportedly knew of the island, but stayed away as they believed it to be inhabited by unfriendly spirits.Īt the turn of the century Bannerman’s was searching for an isolated storage site for the recently acquired (and mostly-explosive) Spanish War surplus. Mostly rock, the 6.5-acre Pollepel Island ( see map) was discovered by early Dutch settlers during their first navigation of the Hudson River. When Bannerman’s was able to purchase 90% of the surplus from the Spanish-American War, the business needed a location to store the merchandise, including the over-100 tons of volatile black powder. Bannerman later moved his store to 501 Broadway in Manhattan in 1905, but city regulations over the danger of storing ammunition precluded him from keeping inventory at his storefronts in town. Tales are often recounted how Bannerman’s filled an order for 100,000 saddles, rifles, knapsacks, gun slings, uniforms, and 20 million cartridges during the Russian-Japanese War.Īs his inventory grew, so did the need for larger storage. Militias and nations would outfit entire armies through Bannerman’s Catalogues. Under Frank’s guidance, Bannerman’s would become the world’s largest seller of surplus military equipment. While young, he understood the value in military surplus goods went beyond that of the underlying scrap metal, and to that end he acquired everything his company could manage. ![]() When Frank’s father joined the union army to fight in the Civil War in 1865, thirteen year-old Frank was left in charge of the family business. The company bought and sold everything from scrap metal and munitions to full ships purchased at naval auctions. The family business: Bannerman’s Military Surplus ( or simply “Bannerman’s”). Absent intervention in the very near future, it may lose the war.įrancis “Frank” Bannerman VI was only three when his family emigrated from Dundee, Scotland to Brooklyn, New York in 1854. For half a century the building has been losing battles against nature. It’s brief resurrection was cut short by a fatal fire. When the castle’s namesake passed away, the island was forgotten. It was the creation of a nineteenth-century businessman and served as an advertisement for the era’s largest military surplus empire. The 100 year-old Bannerman’s Castle was originally built as an arsenal, and has been vacant for the last forty five years since a fire ravaged the island in the summer of 1969. ![]() The crumbling fortress is one of several remaining structures on tiny Pollepel Island, an empty six-and-a-half acre crag hugging the east bank of the Hudson River. On a lonely island fifty miles north of New York City, the bricks of a once-proud castle slowly return to the earth.
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