Frenchman Builds a Dream Château On a Grand Estate in the Ozarks

LEAD HILL, Ark.—Boone County Judge Mike Moore has seen plenty of dreamers promise the world to this humble corner of the Ozarks.

Developers have talked of an amusement park, a Nascar racetrack, a golf course lined with condos. None of that materialized.

So when a dapper Frenchman stopped by his office a few years back to sketch his vision of building a medieval castle in the forest, Judge Moore scoffed.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll believe you when I see the moat,” he recalls. “Well, now I see the moat.”

Actually, just a scale model of the moat. The real thing hasn’t been dug yet. But construction of the castle itself is under way. The first layers of hand-hewn rock are rising from a hillside clearing. The turrets are taking shape, and the arched entry that will one day support the drawbridge. You can hear the plink of chisels, the creak of wooden carts, and the grunts of local laborers who are building the massive fortress by hand, using only tools available in the 13th century.

Which raises the obvious question: Why?

It all begins with the Frenchman, Michel Guyot, who has been obsessed with castles since he was a boy. For years, he renovated medieval ruins. In 1997, he set a grander course: He would build his own crenellated château in the Guédelon forest in Burgundy. To finance the project, he opened the site to tourists. It has been self-sustaining ever since.

The Guédelon castle, which is about halfway built, has drawn visitors from around the world, including Jean-Marc Miret, a French expatriate living in the Ozarks. He was so taken with the concept, he urged Mr. Guyot to build an American version on his estate in Boone County, Ark.

“We went on the Internet to check, where was this Arkansas?” says Noémi Brunet, Mr. Guyot’s wife and business partner. Her conclusion? “It was the middle of nowhere.”

It was also irresistible. Mr. Guyot and Ms. Brunet visited and fell in love with the remote county, best known for its annual crawdad festival. “It’s green and lovely, very authentic, very pure,” Ms. Brunet says.

Returning to France, Mr. Guyot raised $1.5 million from 14 investors—all friends of his—to buy a 50-acre parcel and begin construction.

He cheated at first, just a bit: Mechanized equipment was brought in to build a visitors’ center and a wheelchair-accessible walkway.

But when it comes to the castle itself, Mr. Guyot makes no concessions to modernity—except for those mandated by federal workplace requirements. Workers, though dressed in medieval garb, must wear steel-toed boots and safety goggles.

The stones are quarried at the site; the timber is cut from local trees; every nail and tile is made on premises. Knotted ropes are manipulated to measure angles. Two-ton boulders are hoisted by a foot-cranked crane that resembles a giant wooden hamster wheel.

The site manager has had trouble hiring a basket weaver, but there’s a blacksmith on site, a rope maker, a potter, even a flock of sheep to provide wool for castle tapestries.

Muscles straining as he hoists and splits 50-pound stones to set into the castle’s outer wall, mason Brad Fire Cloud says he dreams of power tools with shock-absorbent grips. “That crosses my mind all day long,” he says.

Six men quit during their first week on the job, including one before noon the first day. There’s no music on site. No cellphones allowed. No McDonald’s runs for lunch breaks. The floppy medieval hats look so goofy that mason Anthony McCutcheon says his wife “just about runs me off when I come home wearing it.”

Still, the two dozen laborers who stuck it out, for wages ranging from about $12 to $20 an hour, have discovered unexpected joys. The work is peaceful and challenging and, best of all, steady.

“Most jobs in masonry last three or four months. Out here, we got 20 years,” says Mr. Fire Cloud, who hides his Dr Pepper in a burlap bag to keep the ambience authentic. “That’s job security.”

Over in the stonecutters hut, meanwhile, master carver Franck Falgairette, who learned the trade in his native France, is teaching apprentice Keith Barnhart to chisel. It isn’t going well.

“I cannot hear the rhythm!” Mr. Falgairette shouts. “Attack! Attack!”

Mr. Barnhart gives a tentative tap.

“The stone will fight you,” Mr. Falgairette says. “But you have a brain. You need to figure out its weak point.”

Mr. Barnhart studies his chunk of rock, looking baffled but undaunted. He spent nine years pouring concrete. Whatever this gig might throw at him, it’s better than that. “Not many people can say they built a castle,” he says, and grins.

The project is being supervised by several historians, including Andrew Tallon, a professor of medieval art and architecture at Vassar College. He admits that at first, the concept struck him as loony. “But it was better than another Disney castle,” he says—so he signed on as an adviser. He toured the emerging battlements recently and says the commitment to authenticity won him over: “It’s just really cool.”

To cover construction costs of about $1 million a year, the Ozark Medieval Fortress must draw 150,000 visitors annually. So far, tourism has been a trickle: Just over 1,000 visitors in a month. But the tourist season doesn’t start in earnest until this weekend, and officials expect it will pick up. They’re marketing heavily in Branson, Mo., a country-music mecca less than an hour’s drive from the castle that attracts 7.5 million tourists a year.

The detour is worth it, says Wendy Flaming, who made time on a recent trip to Branson to tour the fortress. “It’s not something you see every day,” she says. An added bonus? All the walking, she says, works off some of the all-you-can-eat buffets.

It is, indeed, a bit of a hike from the castle to the visitors’ center. Joyce Dahlquist, who runs the gift shop, says since the site opened May 1, several tourists have suggested a golf cart be deployed to haul the tired and the sweaty to their cars. The idea appalls her.

“Excuse me, but that’s 1266 down there,” Ms. Dahlquist says. “They didn’t have golf carts then!”