A Medieval Castle in Massachusetts
John Hays Hammond Jr. might be the most interesting person you've never heard of
On the rocky coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, stands, improbably, a medieval-style stone castle complete with flying buttresses and a drawbridge. The castle dates back to the late 1920s when it was built to satisfy the whims of eccentric inventor John Hays Hammond Jr. The castle, which Hammond dubbed Abbadia Mare, or “abbey by the sea,” houses a massive organ, an imitation cathedral, and a large collection of artifacts from ancient Rome and medieval Europe.
Much like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Hammond’s castle features an array of priceless artifacts hodgedpodged together in a way that is striking, if not always altogether tasteful. The glass-roofed courtyard houses two carved wooden storefronts from medieval France, imported Italian marble columns, and a Roman child sarcophagus from the seventh or eighth century, all arrayed around a green pool. The courtyard once featured a remote-controlled weather system of Hammond’s own invention that could pour down rain or turn day to night.
Hammond’s favorite place in the castle was a nook in the cathedral that housed a bishop’s sixth-century stone throne. Hammond would sit on this stone throne late into the night. He claimed that this was where and when he had his best ideas.
Many of Hammond’s most lucrative ideas were related to the emerging field of remote control. He experimented with remotely controlling vehicles, including remotely piloting a boat 125 miles from Gloucester to Boston. His patents contributed to the development of the remote-controlled torpedo during World War I. After the war, he turned his energies to radio transmission and filed patents for the single-dial radio tuner and innovations in amplification. Hammond was born wealthy (his father worked as a mining engineer for Cecil Rhodes in South Africa) but became much richer by selling patents, most notably to the U.S. military and the RCA. In his lifetime, he registered over 400 patents.
Hammond remains a surprisingly obscure figure, given his unconventional life and the sheer volume of his inventions. He was a contemporary and correspondent of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Nicola Tesla, but he lacks comparable name recognition. I could only find two John Hays Hammond Jr. biographies on Amazon; one is 62 pages, and the other is out of print and listed at $390. Hammond seemed aware that he would eventually be better known for his castle than his inventions. “After I am gone, all my scientific creations will be old-fashioned and forgotten,” wrote Hammond in a letter to his father. “I want to build something in hard stone and engrave on it for posterity a name of which I am justly proud.”
Later in life, Hammond focused his attention on musical instruments. Part of his intention in building the castle was to house a massive 10,000-pipe organ, which can be heard across the bay and was played by the likes of George Gershwin and Virgil Fox. He invented an instrument called the tonal piano, which was designed to conserve the energy that a traditional piano lost to vibration. (Hammond did not invent the miniature organ known as the Hammond Organ, which was invented by Laurens Hammond. The two Hammonds were contemporaries and corresponded about how often they were mistaken for one another.)
In his personal life, as in his architectural tastes, Hammond did not conform to the expectations of early twentieth-century society. He angered his parents by marrying an older divorced woman, the Gloucester portrait painter Irene Fenton. Hammond maintained a close friendship with English actor Leslie Buswell which may have had a romantic element – Hammond Castle museum curator Scott Cordiner characterized their relationship as “a longstanding, very caring and loving affair” in an interview with Harvard magazine. In the same interview, Cordiner described Hammond as pansexual.
I can’t say exactly why John Hammond has a relatively low profile. It’s true that his innovations have been supplanted by newer technologies, but the same can be said for many prominent inventors. Maybe it was the nature of his most influential inventions, which are not easily explained and lacked direct consumer applications (he invented consumer technology as well, though none of it caught on in a lasting way, see “magnetic tableware”). There is only so much room in the history books and our collective imagination; major contributors will inevitably be left on the cutting room floor.
Perhaps Hammond lacked Edison’s gift for marketing and self-mythologizing. This feels odd to say about someone who commissioned a nude statue of himself posing like a Greek god and placed it outside his castle (Hammond’s wife Irene insisted a fig leaf be added, which Gloucester teenagers gleefully stole). But attracting attention is not the same as curating a narrative, and Hammond isn’t easy to valorize or villainize. The best way to characterize him might be as childlike in the best and worst ways, full of wonder and enthusiasm but also possessing a sometimes alarming naivete or lack of consideration.
Hammond traveled frequently and impulsively. He would take off at the drop of a hat for New York, South America, or Europe to track down artifacts for his castle, sometimes giving little notice to his lab engineers. When Hammond was home, he invented furiously, finding inspiration and opportunity in every corner of his life. A New York Herald-Tribune obituary described the breadth of Hammond’s inventions: “The range of Mr. Hammond’s interested is best exemplified by a 1954 dispatch from Washington which noted two patents, issued simultaneously to Mr. Hammond, one a computer design to help helicopters sink submarines, the other a magnetic milkshake mixer.” When he wasn’t inventing, Hammond held parties and delighted in pranking his guests.
Hammond could be careless, sometimes catastrophically so. He had to acquire a second Roman child sarcophagus after he broke the first one by using it as a diving board. Far more gravely, Hammond accepted a commission to build a radio system for Mussolini in the 1920s. Hammond was surprised and alarmed when the radio system was used to hunt down anti-fascists in the years that followed.
Hammond died in 1965 at age 76 after falling ill during a visit to New York for an RCA Board of Directors. He didn’t live to see the era of greater social freedoms that the 1960s ushered in, but he likely would have approved. In 1947 he was quoted in American Magazine: “There is scarcely a greater misfortune than to see real talent choked to death at an early age by tradition, convention, or what is commonly called one’s ‘duty.’ Success is too frequently stymied by circumstances, rather than by lack of ability.”
Though John Hays Hammond Jr. was an unusual man for his time, his story feels very particular to America in the first half of the twentieth century. He turned his father’s fortune earned from colonial ventures into a larger one through the engine of war. He had immense faith in progress, seeing every obstacle as an invention waiting to be dreamed up in his lab. His wealth and success gave him a pass on conformity and bought him the freedom to live in the manner of his choosing. He minted a shiny new myth all of his own: a medieval castle, in Massachusetts
Today, Hammond Castle is open to visitors seven days a week. It’s a popular wedding venue, and a Google search turns up dozens of photos of happy couples standing in front of gothic arches with the sea in the background, some dressed like they are going to the Rennaissance fair. The setting is undeniably beautiful, but aside from the courtyard, the castle itself has few windows. As my tour guide pointed out when I visited last year, castles are designed to be defensible. They make poor beach houses.
But the castle’s exterior belies one of its true functions: to house Hammond’s massive organ. The organ pipes fill much of the space between the walls, like the castle’s blood and bones. The organ hasn’t been in playable condition for a long time, though I’ve heard there is a plan to restore it. I’d like to hear it one day booming out across the bay, once again annoying and delighting the good people of Gloucester.
The main source for this blog post is Nancy Stuart’s biography John Hays Hammond, Jr.: The Father of Remote Control. Thanks also to the very knowledgeable docents at Hammond Castle Museum.