{"id":393,"date":"2009-01-30T08:12:59","date_gmt":"2009-01-30T15:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/?p=393"},"modified":"2009-06-03T08:59:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T15:59:00","slug":"bannermans_island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/archives\/393","title":{"rendered":"The Merchant of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>wenty-five years ago, I was traveling by train up the Hudson’s east shore. About an hour out of Manhattan, I glanced up from my book. We were about four miles north of West Point, near Storm King. About a thousand feet away, a great red castle towered above a craggy, lush green island. The massive keep was a roofless ruin. But it was nonetheless a vision unutterably romantic, and I wondered why and how it had come to stand there.<\/p>\n

The island is called Pollepel, from the Dutch for “spoon” or “pot ladle.” It is mostly rock and covers six and three-quarters acres with a maximum elevation of 115 feet.<\/p>\n

Craig Poole, an area resident, noted in a recent article that the Indians believed the island was haunted and would not stay on it at night. This made Pollepel a useful refuge from Indian attacks. Early Dutch mariners believed Pollepel marked the northern limit of the domain of the Heer of Dunderberg, the fiend of the Hudson Highlands. New sailors were inoculated against the goblin king by ducking in the river as their boats passed the island. During the Revolution, patriots constructed a chevaux de frise<\/em>\u2014an underwater fence of 106 iron-tipped logs, designed to impale and sink ships\u2014between the island and Plum Point on the western shore. For most of the next century, Pollepel was a center for rumrunners and moonshiners.<\/p>\n

Then, on December 5, 1900, Pollepel was sold to Francis Bannerman VI and all things changed. Frank Bannerman was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1851. His family name had been granted to an ancestor by King Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn as an honor for valor in regaining a banner momentarily taken by the enemy.<\/p>\n

Frank’s family emigrated to Brooklyn in 1854. Francis Bannerman V, Frank’s father, began buying flags, rope, and naval stores acquired at Navy auctions for resale. When he joined the Union army, Frank took his place. After the Civil War, the War and Navy Departments discarded weapons by the ton, often for mere scrap value. Frank bought as much as he could. During the next five decades, Bannerman’s became the world’s largest buyer of military surplus.<\/p>\n

Frank loved old weapons and uniforms as historical artifacts and promoted their sale as decorative items. Thom Johnson, who lectures on Bannerman and his island, claims roughly half the cannon used as war memorials throughout the United States originally came from Francis Bannerman’s Sons.<\/p>\n

Most arms dealers are brokers: one orders the weapons and waits. Frank maintained a huge stock in his warehouses, ready for immediate delivery. After moving from Brooklyn to New York City, Frank began outfitting entire militia regiments. Later, he would equip whole armies.<\/p>\n

During the 1870s, Frank began publishing a catalogue, which was revised and published annually into the 1960s. The catalogue was far more than a price list, illustrated with thousands of line drawings, engravings, and photographs. Frank described his guns, swords, and other militaria in mouth-watering detail with lavish accounts of their history and use. The New York Sun<\/em> wrote, “Bannerman could tell an interesting story about everything he had for sale.”<\/p>\n

Frank Bannerman reveals himself in his catalogues: a practical romantic, enamored with tales of valor, intrigued by how things work, and a good writer with a dry sense of humor and an unembarrassed religious faith. He pointed out that the New Testament shows the Apostles carrying at least two swords with them as they accompanied Jesus in his preaching, Peter using “one to good effect,” and argued that “the carrying of weapons met with the approval of the Prince of Peace.” Yet he prayed for the day that Bannerman’s Military Museum would become “The Museum of Lost Arts.”<\/p>\n

In the meantime, as “St. John’s vision of Satan bound and the one thousand years of peace” was not yet in sight, Frank was making money in the second-hand arms market, particularly in South and Central America. Smaller countries needed weapons without needing state of the art equipment. Frank was their man.<\/p>\n

Haiti, in particular, often dealt with him. Indeed, Bannerman could be considered almost a part of Haiti’s political process. Robert Debs Heinl’s admirable Written in Blood,<\/em> perhaps the only extensive modern history of Haiti in English, points out that late Victorian Haiti enjoyed liberal democratic constitutions. They were ignored by all players. Every few years, some politician conceived presidential ambitions. He went unto the hills and sounded out the caciques, the local politico-military bosses. This is analogous to entering the New Hampshire primaries. If he found support, he then went to campaign contributors, usually promising that bread cast upon the waters now would return a thousand-fold upon his victory when his supporters could steal the customs house receipts. This is like raising campaign funds from road contractors when running for County Superintendent of Highways.<\/p>\n

The money went to arms dealers in New York, comparable to political consultants who produce commercials. One gathers Bannerman was among them: the Haitian common soldiery were largely clothed in Civil War castoffs, a market Bannerman had long since cornered. Bannerman’s catalogues offered everything a candidate might need, from muskets and Gatling guns to second-hand steam yachts, suitable for conversion to warships “fully armed and equipped,” FOB New York\u2014all, of course, strictly cash in advance.<\/p>\n

The candidate then returned to Haiti, landing outside Port-au-Prince to link up with cacique armies streaming down from the hills. The incumbent president calculated his chances, looted the Treasury for the last time, and took the steamer for Jamaica. The victor seized the National Palace while the troops had a good time in the big city. A few years later, it would begin all over again.<\/p>\n

Around the turn of the century, Frank purchased 501 Broadway, near Greene Street, for a retail store and free military museum, opened to the public in 1905. The New York Herald<\/em> said of it, “No museum in the world exceeds it in the number of exhibits.” There were the thousand different guns (“from the early matchlock, up to the present day automatic”), the thousand different swords (from the Roman “bronze blade…to the present day regulation”), the thousand different pistols, and the other appurtenances of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.<\/p>\n

Amid all this, after the Spanish-American War of 1898, Frank purchased ninety percent of all captured Spanish war materiel in a sealed bid auction. Buying the accumulation of Spain’s four centuries in Cuba was all in a day’s work for Frank: flags, body armor, medals, uniforms, swords, saddles, Gatling guns, field and coastal artillery, 200,000 Mauser rifles, 30 million cartridges, pistols, shells, and thousands of tons of black powder.<\/p>\n

The City government took a dim view of keeping it within city limits. Hence Frank’s purchase of Pollepel. For the next seventeen years, Frank Bannerman designed and supervised the construction of the island’s storehouses, workshops, docks, gardens, and moat. He built a power plant and laid telephone lines to the mainland. He created an artificial harbor by sinking in place old wheat barges and railroad floats filled with stones and dirt, covering them with concrete, and building an ornate breakwater with towers and bridged gateways.<\/p>\n

Then, in 1908, Frank Bannerman started his private castle, the fortress of his dreams, armed with an extraordinarily dark, brooding, and passionate misunderstanding of Scottish Victorian architecture. The entire complex — breakwaters and all — became an encrusted mass of crennelations, turrets, moats, and battlements. The Bannerman arms were above nearly every doorway; the street lights were formed like thistles; Biblical quotations were cast into the fireplace mantles. Almost all of it was done without the help of an architect.<\/p>\n

Pollepel became, as one commentator said, “a bit of Scotland…deposited on a bare bit of rock mid-river.” A heavily illustrated slick-paper pamphlet, Bannerman Island, published by the firm in 1918, captures Pollepel’s eccentricity. On the cover, the warehouse glowers above the landing dock, ornamented with six-inch naval guns, with a road leading to a gate tower and portcullis. Along the roof line, just below the crennelations, the words “BANNERMAN’S ISLAND ARSENAL” stand out darkly against the light brick.<\/p>\n

The largest cannon could be barged up the Hudson to his dock, with “the surrounding water provided at least moderate protection from casual visitors,” as Joseph Schroeder wrote in his introduction and by motorboat, and gave them a great time with swimming, hiking, picnics, and firing cannon from his castle walls.
\nFrank died in November, 1918, worn out by the First World War. Within two years of his death, his arsenal survived a spectacular accident on August 15, 1920 when two hundred pounds of black powder exploded, heaving “brick, munitions, and equipment high into the summer sky.” The explosion flung a twenty-five foot section of wall nearly a quarter mile to land across the New York Central tracks along the east shore. The cities of Hudson and Peekskill were shaken by the explosion. Schroeder wrote that “Contemporary newspaper reports state that rescue boats were kept from approaching the island for some time by…exploding ammunition.” Yet only three people were injured.<\/p>\n

The Bannerman family continued using the island as a summer residence. In a recent interview, Jane Bannerman, the widow of Frank’s grandson Charles, said that the castle was well-maintained as late at the thirties, with the grounds cluttered with relics such as the great chain placed across the Hudson at West Point during the Revolution, sleighs and other equipment used by Peary to seek the North Pole, and a table used by George Washington.<\/p>\n

The catalogue continued offering the stuff little boys’ dreams are made of: African spears, Moroccan saddles, cannon, swords, scimitars, uniforms, helmets, cocked hats, armor, medals, pistols, rifles, artillery, armed yachts. But the Second World War bred massive competition: Frank Bannerman’s heirs were not so much his own flesh and blood as the Army-Navy stores in every town. Francis Bannerman’s Sons played no role in the disposition of World War II surplus comparable to that of the Spanish American War. The firm could no longer provide huge quantities of equipment from stock as when, during the Russo-Japanese War, Frank Bannerman had sold the Japanese 100,000 Mausers and 20 million cartridges — all from inventory, all immediately available.<\/p>\n

The Broadway store, still considered the greatest private military museum in the world, was now five stories and several subbasements of dusty confusion. Yet, as Harry Wandrus wrote in the June, 1960 issue of Hobbies magazine, a searcher willing to get filthy could still find complete Civil War vintage Springfield and Enfield muskets and the spare parts to maintain them.<\/p>\n

Conditions on the island were worse. The buildings had been neglected and much of the materiel in storage damaged beyond recovery. In the January, 1959 issue of Guns magazine, Bill Edwards described visiting the island with Val Forgett, an explosives expert whom Bannerman’s had retained to deactivate the live ammunition: “Noting…two giant 16 inch shells flanking the entrance to the harbor, Val grabbed a wrench and had an assistant boost him up to the nose so he could unscrew the fuse…the fuses were live and the projectiles full of high explosive…” Apparently, their efforts were successful: they survived.<\/p>\n

“The Largest Dealers in the World in Military Goods” closed 501 Broadway in 1959. The museum pieces from both the store and the island went to the Smithsonian Institution. In 1967, the Bannermans sold the island to New York State. They supposedly removed the old military merchandise. But the closing was a rush job: Jane Bannerman said, “We always meant to go back to get personal things, like my grandmother’s Irish linen bed sheets.”<\/p>\n

The Taconic State Park Commission took possession on July 1, 1968. They offered public tours of the island and planned to preserve the buildings as a park. On the night of August 8, 1969, a great fire reduced the buildings to bare walls. Perhaps not all the munitions had been removed. Some still speculate about what lies under the ruins.<\/p>\n

The Bannerman Island Trust, PO Box 843, Glenham NY 12527, telephone (914) 831-6346, has persuaded the State to study reopening the island to the public and works to stabilize the buildings for future restoration. For today, as Lenore Person recently wrote, the island “is covered with poison ivy. And it’s infested with snakes and deer ticks.”<\/p>\n

Yet Frank Bannerman’s castle still stirs the imagination, its ruined walls rising from the river mists, as distant, as untouchable, as a dream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>wenty-five years ago, I was traveling by train up the Hudson’s east shore. About an hour out of Manhattan, I glanced up from my book. We were about four miles north of West Point, near Storm King. About a thousand feet away, a great red castle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5181,"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions\/5181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cityofsmoke.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}