REID HALL CASTLE (OPHIR HALL)

Reid Castle, once called Ophir Hall, is a six story, eighty-four room granite castle located near the corner of Purchase Street and Anderson Hill Road in Purchase, New York. It was origionally built for Ben Holladay, of the Holladay Overland Mail and Express Company, sometime after the Civil War. Mr. Holladay called his estate Ophir Farm. In addition to the castle, with its crenelated towers and balustraded roofline, the Holladays also built a Norman Gothic chapel, a coach house, stables, a root cellar,and houses for the 60 servants that they employed. Mr. Holladay also built a museum on the estate dedicated to the Old West. He stocked the grounds with herds of elk and buffalo, and the streams with trout and wild ducks. Holladay was financially ruined by the panic of 1873, and soon lost the estate.

Ophir Hall was eventually purchased by Whitelaw Reid, publisher of The New York Tribune. While Mr. Reid was having the castle altered, it caught fire, burning to the stone walls. The house was rebuilt, on a greater and grander scale with the assistance of the firm of McKim, Mead, and White.

Reid Castle has an interior of marble and carved wood. There are secret staircases, fixtures of silver and crystal, and 13th century stained glass windows taken from Salisbury Cathedral in England. Ophir Hall almost became the headquarters for the United Nations in 1946, but neighbors protested and local resident John D. Rockefeller, Jr. offered an alternative site in New York City.

Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart bought the mansion in 1949 along with 250 of the origional 900 acres. In 1969, it was renamed Reid Hall. In 1974, Reid Hall was placed in The National Register of Historic Places. Visitors are welcome from 9 to 5 every day of the year.

{{Castlefinder note!}}
I visited this castle in January of 1999. The people I talked to seemed to be very proud of their castle. It is in very good condition, and well worth the visit.

Later, I received E-Mail that said:

The rug in the right parlor on the ground floor came from the SS United States, which is now in mothballs on the Delaware in Philadelphia. The college website offers an excellent history here: http://www.mville.edu/ABOUT/castle.htm

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A special thanks to Phil Bilzor for most of the information on this page.