The Fantastic Castle of Vineland: George Daynor and the Palace Depression

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INTRODUCTION

Travel to almost any state in America and chances are good that you will find a unique—in some cases downright odd—structure built by a strange man under somewhat unusual circumstances. Florida had Edward Leedskalnin, a mysterious hermit who, working alone at night, reportedly levitated the gray stone walls and sculptures of the Coral Castle in Miami into place between 1923 and 1951. Georgia was the home of Eddie Owens Martin, better remembered as St. EOM, who started building his colorful Aztec/Asian–influenced creation called Pasaquan in Buena Vista around 1955. Then there was Henry Mercer of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, who was so terrified of fire that in 1912 he commissioned the construction of Fonthill, a fairy tale–style castle made completely out of poured concrete with staircases that led nowhere. However, if the strange man community had to crown a king, that title would have very likely been handed to George Daynor. Martin’s vision may have been guided by alien creatures, but Daynor claimed he was inspired by no less than the angels themselves to build the Palace Depression in the rural town of Vineland, New Jersey.

Like many small American towns, Vineland had gotten off to a great start in the mid-nineteenth century. Founded in 1861 by a young Philadelphia attorney named Charles K. Landis, it was a planned community carved out of twenty thousand acres of scrubland in the heart of South Jersey. While Vineland was only about one square mile in size, it was surrounded by Landis Township. Landis, who had been involved with the creation of Hammonton, would later go on to found Sea Isle City. As his first solo project, Vineland received the full benefit of his creativity. The center of town featured a tree-lined, one-hundred-foot-wide avenue named, appropriately enough, after the founder; parks were an integral part of Vineland’s design. Landis even concerned himself with innovative methods of waste disposal, wanting every aspect of his new town to appeal to settlers.

Initially, some feared that Vineland’s landlocked location would prevent it from succeeding, but the advent of the railroads soon changed their minds. Before long, the town was connected to Philadelphia, New York and other major cities, and droves of people rode the rails to South Jersey. Landis, an expert at advertising, made Vineland sound like the Promised Land to immigrants who had come to America in search of a better life.

The fledgling community soon boasted thriving businesses and fine hotels that dominated Landis Avenue. A six-room house and an acre of ground could be purchased for $100. Industrious farmers flocked to the surrounding township to build new and better lives for themselves and their families. Vineland quickly became known as a cultural mecca that attracted nationally known speakers, artists and performers, including Victoria Woodhull, Frederick Douglass and the Barrymores. A number of United States presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, visited the town in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Roosevelt was on the campaign trail, Grant spoke at the dedication of Vineland’s first public high school.

Vineland had been founded on the premise that everyone deserved a new opportunity, a chance for an education or simply a fresh start. By the end of the Civil War, about five thousand new residents called the town home. Comfortable and prosperous by the end of the nineteenth century, Vineland residents—like many Americans—were forced to see the world a little differently with the advent of World War I. Although their town survived, by the 1920s, its economic future looked about as bleak as the rest of the nation’s. When the stock market crashed in 1929, everyone’s hopes fell right along with it.

Enter George Daynor. Like Vineland, he had seen better days when he blew into town with little more than the shirt on his back. At a time before Social Security, credit cards and computers that allowed fast background checks on a person’s identification, it is very likely that Daynor invented at least part—if not almost all—of the highly colorful life he claimed to have lived before showing up in town. In the years that followed, Daynor continued to be known as an eccentric character with a gift for attracting public attention—both good and bad. Similar to a Depression-era Donald Trump, he constantly tried to manipulate public opinion at every opportunity. Unfortunately, his thirst for publicity would ultimately prove his undoing.

Despite his personal trials and tribulations, Daynor was extremely focused when it came to building the unique structure that he originally dubbed the Palace Depression. Although many area residents dismissed him as crazy, an attitude that provoked his anger, Daynor didn’t let any negative public opinion sway him from his self-appointed task. The unusual building, which resembled a nightmarish version of a Grimm’s fairy tale castle, quickly became a South Jersey landmark, one that left an indelible impression on most of the people who visited it during its years of operation. Publicized in the national media, the colorful palace drew thousands of visitors from throughout the United States and other countries.

Although it had begun to decay by the 1960s, one local boy named Kevin Kirchner was so impressed by the palace that restoring the structure to its former glory would become his personal mission as an adult. But no one was concerned with saving the palace when Daynor’s antics caught the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the late 1950s. When he falsely claimed to have solved an out-of-state kidnapping, Daynor’s life began to fall apart. He had made the mistake of telling his tall tale to federal officials who weren’t about to dismiss him as a harmless eccentric. Before long, everyone from the local populace to the residents of the Big Apple had an opinion about Daynor’s motivation when they learned he had lied to the FBI. But in all likelihood, Daynor himself probably didn’t even know why he had done it.

To this day, much of Daynor’s life remains shrouded in mystery. Even before his run-in with the federal government, he seemed to move phantom-like from place to place. Records are sparse, supposedly lost in fires or disasters long before computer systems came along to act as a safeguard. Most of the people who once knew him have died, while many of those who remain prefer to keep him firmly fixed in the past. As a result, it has often been difficult to separate fact from fiction when relating the story of his life. For example, the records of the kidnapping case made available through the FBI were very detailed but at the same time thoroughly redacted to protect the identity of many of the witnesses.

But in reality, the kidnapping was just one part of a story that even today remains a riddle that might never be solved. Confronted by conflicting stories and limited resources, the author—as a veteran writer and researcher—was sometimes forced to make subjective judgments regarding the available information. In some cases, the version of the story that can be reasonably verified does not always concur with the stories that have long been accepted as fact.

Hopefully, more information will someday become available on Daynor’s early years and even his life in Vineland. In the meantime, everything that follows was documented in existing records, newspapers and occasionally the memories of local residents who had stories to share about the palace and its unusual owner. There may in fact be more to this story, but what was on file made for some fascinating research.

Curious? Then let’s take a walk through the underbrush, back to an earlier time when George Daynor arrived in South Jersey and turned a landfill into a palace fit for the angels.

Chapter 1

IN THE BEGINNING

Truth might be stranger than fiction, but for one man, reality required more than a little polishing from time to time. After all, why else would anybody ever pay attention to yet another hobo at a time when thousands of them were forced out onto the highways of America?

The year 1929 is best remembered for Black Tuesday, the bleak October day when the stock market crashed, marking the official arrival of the Great Depression in the United States. While a lot of people had been struggling prior to that time, it seemed that many families literally lost everything after the market’s death knell sounded on that dark day. Ragged armies of men and women began wandering from town to town, desperate for work. They slept in shanties, traveled in railroad boxcars and sometimes survived on the occasional handout from folks who were kind enough not to automatically look the other way. While the politicians talked, the people walked and—for a long time—they were accepted as just another shadow across the American landscape.

That same year, George Daynor strode into the rural South Jersey town of Vineland like he owned the place. For someone who may have spent time as a hobo, he looked remarkably well fed and well rested, and he was confident that Vineland was the place he wanted to call home. His physical appearance was enough to immediately capture public attention: taller than average at five feet, ten inches in height, he was burly with shoulder-length, reddish-brown hair, a thick moustache and a full beard.

No one knows for certain what initially brought Daynor to the area. He didn’t have any relatives in Vineland; he claimed that he had in fact never even visited New Jersey before that time. When Daynor later related some of the story of his early years, he said that he had already been a wanderer for at least several months before landing in the Garden State. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that anyone will ever know for sure just how much time Daynor spent on the open road, since many of his adventures were never documented beyond the tales he ultimately shared with the media—and those varied according to his many moods.

George Daynor claimed at various times to have been a gold miner in Alaska, a millionaire in San Francisco, a stock market investor and a hobo who wandered across America during the Great Depression. There is some question as to whether George Daynor was even his real name. As of this writing, his true identity remains a mystery that is yet unsolved.

In some newspaper accounts, Daynor showed up in Philadelphia around 1929 after traveling across a Depression-ravaged America for several months. When he supposedly learned that jobs were available in southern New Jersey, he rode the ferry across the Delaware River, where he apparently had a scrape with the law in Camden County shortly afterward. But like just about everything related to him, there are several versions of