On a wooded side street a short walk from downtown Fairhope stands a house that stops first-time visitors in their tracks: a stone castle with towers, a moat, a drawbridge and dragons worked into the details. It is not a theme park set piece. It is the product of three generations of one Fairhope family, built by hand, beginning with a soldier’s sketch mailed home after World War II and continuing to this day.
It Started With Craig Sheldon
The story begins with Craig Sheldon, who came to Fairhope from Monteagle, Tennessee, as a small child in 1922, arriving the way so many early visitors did — by bay boat on the Mobile Bay steamers. He married Annie in Florida in 1940, and after World War II the couple settled on a piece of land in town and began building what neighbors came to call the Sheldon Castle. Sheldon had lived in Alaska and built the first structure like an Alaska-style cabin, adding on over the years; while serving in the Marines he mailed home a drawing of the tower he would eventually add.
Long before “reduce, reuse, recycle” became a slogan, Sheldon built the way salvage taught him. Bottles, rocks and storm-cast beach debris he collected went straight into the walls, and what neighbors put out for the trash he turned into part of the castle. A workshop he built on the property later became a bed and breakfast. To the family it was simply home — “we never called it a castle,” his daughter Pagan Mosher remembers, “but the people of Fairhope called it that.”
The Next Generation Adds a Castle
Pagan Sheldon Mosher, the second of three generations living on the property, grew up around her father’s art. Dean Mosher first came to Mobile from Niagara Falls in the 1960s — a culture shock, he says, during the Civil Rights era — and was later accepted to the Harris School of Art in Nashville, which taught the Rockwell technique of illustration. He knew Pagan’s father before he knew Pagan: Sheldon taught Dean carpentry, and the two became fast friends. The couple met at Fairhope Arts and Crafts, and their first date was a family affair — a trip to St. Peter’s fish fry in Bon Secour with her parents. Dean proposed on the second date.
When the Moshers bought the property next door, Dean continued the family trade, adding a Gothic arch structure and then a castle of his own, built with handmade roofs, balconies, trim, doors and furniture from his designs. The house next door in the same style became known as the Boom Hobbit Castle, and the family calls the ground the castles share “The Shire.” Dean’s studio is entered across a drawbridge over a moat fed by a fountain whose centerpiece is the crucible once used to pour molten bronze for his father-in-law’s sculptures. Renowned potter Charlie Smith created the sunburst that graces the tower’s south face.
For 40 years, Pagan co-managed and directed the downtown Creative Outlet Dance Center with fellow Fairhope resident Gina Lanaux; a retired professional dancer, she still teaches ballet. Dean’s studio work has traveled much further: his historical paintings hang in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy and the University of Virginia, with subjects ranging from the Battle of Fort Mims and the Wright brothers’ flight to Admiral Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay. He was commissioned to paint the four little girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing for the Alabama Department of Travel and Tourism, and is working on a book about his friend and father-in-law, Craig Sheldon.
From Extreme Homes to the Guest Book
The castles have drawn national attention for decades. The family was among the first homes featured on HGTV’s Extreme Homes, and local print and television crews filmed the property as well. About five years after that wave of attention, the Moshers opened Storybook Castle as a bed and breakfast, letting guests stay in a private suite of the registered Baldwin County historic home, walk the grounds of both castles, and fall asleep next to protected parkland alive with owls.
The nickname story says as much about the family as the architecture does. Pagan’s mother Annie weighed about 80 pounds, but as Marines her father’s circle called one another “Mac” or “Butch,” and the name stuck for life — friends of 60 years learned her real name only at her funeral.
Visitors can see Dean Mosher’s studio and the castle grounds when they visit Fairhope, and the castles remain exactly what they have always been: a home first, a life’s work second, and one of the most remarkable examples of folk craftsmanship on the Gulf Coast.