They wanted a castle. So Jim Bishop was going to build them a castle.
The seed for a castle was planted when some locals drove by the stone cottage and commented how its latest addition—an improvised water tank finished in masonry and furnished with arched windows—looked so very castle-like. This got the wheels of Jim’s imagination turning.
“He started adding onto the rock cottage, and my grandpa asked him what he was doing,” Jim’s son Daniel Bishop, 50, told The Epoch Times. “He said, ‘People want a castle, I’m gonna build them one.’ And my grandpa never helped a day after that in any way.”
Notably, Jim’s dad did eventually complete a rock cottage that became a gift shop, though it ended up burning down.
Of course, Jim meant well in his grand aspiration to build a castle for locals to enjoy—despite his dad’s hesitancy. His motive came from a profound experience he had growing up poor. As a teenager, during an outing with visiting family members at Seven Falls, he almost couldn’t afford admission.
A Castle-Building “Obsession”
Starting on a shoestring budget, Jim’s castle-building bug became “an obsession.” It began as just a weekend thing—he spent weekdays in the iron shop. But his fixation soon exploded as he started accepting local donations, allowing him to close up shop five months of the year during summer and devote that time to realizing his vision. All his extra money was poured into the castle. “There was five to ten years where [my father] just busted his butt building castle all summer long,” Daniel said.It was the 70s and few cared if he quarried the National Forest for rocks. Ditches along the road and local landslides were fair game. But as Jim’s castle-building project saw him hauling three to four tons per load, the National Forest Service took notice and started charging him $15 a ton for a rock-hauling permit. That was too much, Jim thought, especially as he was “giving the castle away” to the public, benefitting the county.
That was more like it, Jim thought.
He accepted. And all were happy.
Eventually, the government relaxed about the rocks. Jim has “not bought a permit in a long time,” said Daniel, adding that maybe they came to appreciate the concept of attracting tourism dollars. There would be fewer roadblocks ahead for Bishop Castle from then on.
Throughout the 70s and 80s, Jim was a one-man castle-building crew—and he was fit enough for it. An “Olympic-quality” bodybuilder, according to his son, Jim could single-arm curl a 150-pound barbell. He was also resourceful. Tossing rocks into the back of a truck, he hauled them onsite and piled some 500 pounds of rock and concrete onto a skid, which he rigged up to a pulley system; he then hooked a line to his vehicle and drove the whole heap to frightening heights before climbing up himself to start setting stone. It was a performance, to say the least.
The castle stretched skyward.
Up, up, up it went.
As a teenager, for several years Daniel saw the castle grow like a living organism. A stone cottage became a two-story fort. Then a third floor was added with a peaked roof, comprising a “Great Hall”—that was dubbed the “Cathedral.”
Building on the cathedral motif, Jim fashioned flying buttresses—like those on Notre Dame in Paris—which were set into the ground to brace the walls, for Jim feared the masonry would topple outward as it stood so tall. In a fundraiser, Jim enlisted local artisans to craft stained glass windows for the “cathedral”—for Jim’s wife had made the project into a foundation for infants who needed heart surgery—and thus they yoked public participation.
As you can guess, the citadel is decked out in ornamental iron—with wrought iron balconies, decorative roof trusses, and even a dragon. “The dragon out on the front was built … in [Jim’s] iron shop one winter as something to try to get some more publicity,” Daniel said. “Then it was hauled up in two pieces, and hoisted up with a pully, and welded onto the castle.”
If You Build It, They Will Come
Bishop Castle would have been for naught had nobody come to enjoy it. So, did people come?Yes. And in droves.
Besides tourists, for a time it was also a haven for all-night parties where hundreds of costume-wearing youngsters would set up psychedelic light shows, have DJs blaring techno music, and dance the night away until sunrise. Freedom won the day, for better or worse.
Yet with freedom comes responsibility. Neither Jim nor his son would bar visitors from exploring yet there are parts where iron platforms dangle over dizzying heights and the slightest swaying or rattling disturbs the mind. Any sane person would ask, is it safe? “I’m of the feeling that we keep it structurally safe,” Daniel said. But there is a caveat that harks back to Jim the teenager climbing the rocks at Seven Falls.
It is private property. All are welcome yet they “enter at their own risk,” Daniel said, adding testamentally that “nobody has ever sustained an injury as a result of being in or on the castle—that I’m aware of.”
Sadly, Jim suffered a mental breakdown in 2021 due to a bipolar disorder that rendered him unable to build for the past two seasons. After 52 years, his castle-building days have come to an end. Since 2018, Daniel has held the fort—overseeing what has become a profitable legacy for American freedom, as Jim had intended.
Today, Bishop Castle is a spectacle to behold standing majestically in the National Forest, though Daniel assures us that it’s “far from being done if you go by the picture that I believe is in [my father’s] head of what he wanted to see there.” He mentioned one tower still needs some stonework done. Maybe one day, he will get around to it.
But what of the rocks he would need, and where would they come from? The landslide? The National Forest? The ditch? More importantly, what about the permit he would need and the cost? Jim’s son explained. “The castle has become semi-successful enough to where I would probably not try to get rock off the National Forest,” he said, adding, not “without contributing to the mountain through some monetary form.”
