Lomax Castle: Part One, The End
(Toward Explaining the Shape of American Cities)
Thanks for stopping 'round. I thought I’d have posted more since my Flannery O’Connor pilgrimage. If you know me, you know I’ve not been inactive. More about that soon. And when I tell you more about that soon, I’ll explain the context for this strange thing I’m sharing with you now. It’s the first part of a story and tells the story’s end. It’s the story of an incredible old Jacksonville house called The Lomax Castle, demolished when I was a year old. All I’ll say for now is what’s below. Except that I’m grateful for all my subscribers. If you’re a paid subscriber, you help me do what I’m doing for other than free.
He’d bought his own castle, “the Lomax Castle,” on Lomax Street by the river, in the falling old neighborhood of Riverside, in 1974. The old cedar-shingled house rose dark, with its three and a half story tower and its widow’s-walk behind the crown of a tall palm. Without appearing in a Shirley Jackson novel, Howell Graham Warth, who went by Hal, would get to live in a castle. But first he had to take it apart, piece by piece. At least, such was his story.
The story of a house is the story of its people and the relationship between the place and their lives. Even so, I question whether to be upfront about its afterlife. There’s no certain order in which a story must unfold, so I’ll begin with the end, then come later into things that happened earlier.
The story ends in 1975, after Hal and Beth Warth dismantled large portions of the Lomax Castle, piece by piece, and transported them to the small town of Middleburg, southwest of Jacksonville in Clay County. Its new neighbors, whether for some unfathomable reason or out of pure destructive spite, set the deconstructed Castle on fire. They burned it to the ground. Then they stole the slabs of marble that had once topped the fireplaces. All that’s left in those Middleburg woods, 50 years later, is broken glass and melted copper long grown over. And, like blood crying up to God from the ground, unrighted injustice.
Nor was Clay County done with Hal Warth. More than 40 years later, in the summer of 2016, TV news stations reported he’d disappeared. He was 79 years old. He’d known the paths through Jennings State Forest well. Organized searches of the woods failed to find him. Then on January 8, 2017, squirrel hunters found his remains off Hattie Nolan Road, near County Road 218, about three miles from his home on Scully Hill Road.
Brief context. It was Clarence T. Doty who built the Queen Anne-style house in 1894, but a German immigrant named Hermann Weibert who lived in the house longest. I’ll tell you about Doty, the Weiberts and the strange Bureau of Investigation file on Hermann later. I’ll also tell you about the curator of reptiles and, in the 1970s, the founders of the head shop called Edge City who split the second floor. And the urban legend about the maid in the basement. But first, this is how the end began:
Hal Warth was a dreamer, and “Lomax Castle,” said the October 22, 1974 headline in The Jacksonville Journal, “Is The Stuff His Dreams Are Made On.” The story began misleadingly. It said that Warth, 38 years old, had spent the last four months “driven by one goal – to restore life to an abandoned three-story house on Lomax Street.” Despite “time and vandals” having robbed the old house of its “former glory,” Warth had sold most everything he owned to focus on saving the house. Beth called him a fanatic. All that was true. But the house had already been sentenced to death. If Hal was restoring it to life, he was doing so by taking it to pieces.
Emmett Ferguson, a physician who lived in another “castle,” the old Leon Cheek House, had bought a number of dilapidated old houses in historic Riverside, one of so many American core neighborhoods suffering from the death spiral of suburbanization and White Flight. Now he was selling the Lomax Castle so a developer could knock it down and build a condo tower. After the ouster of the last tenants, those former high school teachers who started Edge City, thieves walked in and helped themselves.
They looted the glass doors at its entrance, beveled glass from doors and windows, marble chiseled from fireplaces, a central “pear-shaped chandelier,” which depended from the third-floor ceiling alongside a white spiral staircase. So Warth took apart what hadn’t been stolen, planning to transport the house in pieces to a quiet place in the woods where he’d make of them a new house altogether.
The Warths looked into moving the house on flatbed trailers, paying to remove electrical wires, or transporting the house down the river by barge. They decided instead to use their 18-foot truck to move it board by board. Though the Clay County house would be new, Warth said, he planned to salvage and reuse the cedar shingles, the circular porch, even the three and a half story tower itself.
He’d spent lots of time sick as a child, worked out a lot of jigsaw puzzles in bed. His previous occupations included singer, airplane pilot and carpenter and he presently worked as an independent trucker. He split the Castle in two, and using five-ton jacks, pulled it into smaller and smaller pieces.
“It’s a beautiful house,” he told the papers, “and basically very sound.” He thought it would cost $750,000 to build the house in 1974, a figure close to $5 million in today’s money, but figured “the worst I could come out is about $30,000 in lumber.”
He called himself “an intellectual but not an egghead.” He concerned himself with ecology “and trends of American society,” but believed tradition to be important. Rather than White Flight, he saw his project as attuned to the Back to the Land Movement. The Lomax Castle, Warth said, would have been demolished whether or not he’d bought it, but he and Beth were reconstructing the grand house out in the countryside for their infant son.
The sentiment sounded laudable and the effort seemed herculean. That house, he knew, would not be this house. Either house, out in the country, would not be the house this house could have been when Riverside rose from its White Flight-depths into a more storied, inclusive and urban future than its exclusive wealthy builders ever imagined.
Into the autumn of ’74, Hal Warth numbered each board as he loaded sections of the Castle onto his truck. Beth dug through old papers left inside – newspapers, old letters and coins. A woman who’d grown up next door remembered Hermann Weibert, who lived in the house for 45 years until his death at home here in 1955, as “refined,” said he kept the house “in perfect order. He always said that junk clutters the mind.” She remembered red poppies and blue delphiniums in the yard.
That day in October, the famous photographer Rocco Morabito, who’d won a Pulitzer Prize for his Jacksonville Journal photo Kiss of Life in ’68, stood beneath the last owner of the Lomax Castle, watched him climb toward the cone-shaped ceiling that topped the three and a half story tower (around which winds, having entered the house from wraparound porches through open windows, created odd acoustics, mimicking vocals), as though ascending toward hope itself, and snapped the vanishing point.
Loving the story! I hardly ever hear of anyone dreaming that kind of big anymore. Seems a shame.