Dupont Castle is a website about a castle that spent decades being under construction in both senses of the phrase.
The site follows James and Patricia Dupont’s long-running project to design and build their own castle on 75 acres. An FAQ explains the basic logic with admirable efficiency: they liked castles, there were very few suitable ones for sale, so they decided to build one themselves.
The pages preserve construction progress going back to the late 1990s. There are photographs of the building site, gates, towers, the keep, the great hall, masonry, floor systems, doors, snow delays and years in which progress slowed to a crawl.
That last part matters.
Most project pages document the triumphant end state. Dupont Castle documents the middle for decades.
A construction diary accidentally became an archive
The 2016 page describes the three-story keep where the couple lived, the garage and storage areas, and the unfinished great hall. It records laying block, installing joists and building structural components. Later pages continue the same rhythm: weather, visitors, small improvements and the recurring reality that a personally built castle is a very large thing to finish.
By 2022, the site was reassuring readers who had noticed the lack of new photographs. The owners were older and moving more slowly, but still there and still doing work.
The website also grew into something much larger than one construction diary.
Its “Castles of the United States” section catalogs hundreds of castle-like buildings across the country. The state-by-state pages mix known landmarks, private homes, armories, water towers and buildings that are admitted with wonderfully loose criteria such as “okay, it’s not a castle, but it looks like one.”
Individual entries often preserve emails from readers who supplied local history, addresses, photographs and corrections. One Colorado entry, for example, accumulates information across years from people who had lived nearby, visited the property or found county-history sources.
That is old-web crowdsourcing before the term became ordinary. One person built the index, readers emailed additions, and the page became progressively stranger and more useful.
The site is also a reminder that preservation value does not require institutional polish. Dupont Castle is personal, inconsistent and deeply specific. That specificity is exactly why it captures things larger databases often miss.
Building a castle takes a while.
Fortunately, HTML is patient.