Out among the cattle pastures, orange groves and pine forests about an hour east of Sarasota, follow the signs down a quiet road in the tiny hamlet of Ona and you'll come upon a most improbable sight: a gleaming three-story silver castle complete with turrets, a bell tower, stained-glass windows, wrought iron portcullis and two knights in armor flanking the entrance. You might feel as though you’d stepped through a portal into another world, and that’s because, essentially, you have. Solomon’s Castle is one man’s unique creative vision turned into reality. 

The artist Howard Solomon began building the castle in the early 1970s as his workshop and art studio and, eventually, a residence for himself and several generations of his family. He lived there until his death in 2016. More than 300 pieces of his whimsical artwork, made mostly out of found objects and reclaimed materials, are on display throughout the castle, and his sense of humor is evident in the script that the tour guides still use to this day, which Solomon originally wrote with all his signature puns, jokes, and witticisms.

“I always say my dad made everything in here, including me,” says Alane Solomon, Howard’s daughter, who now runs the place. “He didn’t just build a workshop or gallery; he created this whole world for us with his own hands.”

Her father hired help to pour the concrete floor and lift the trusses he had built into place, but otherwise did all the work himself, using recycled materials as often as he could. The shiny exterior of the castle is made of discarded offset aluminum printing plates from the Wauchula Herald-Advocate that Solomon bought for 25 cents apiece in the early 1980s and which have survived several major hurricanes.

A high school dropout with no formal training from Rochester, New York, Solomon headed south in his early 20s and lived in St. Petersburg and the Bahamas, mostly building furniture, cabinets and boats and learning the construction trade. One day, a customer told him, “You’re not a cabinet maker, you’re an artist.” Solomon decided to head to what, at the time, was quiet central Florida to begin work on his artistic legacy.

“The land was cheap, and so was he,” Alane says with a laugh. In March of 1970, her father purchased 40 acres tucked alongside Horse Creek in Hardee County. Come June, when the summer rains came and the creek flooded, Solomon realized that he had been sold a parcel of good old Florida swampland. With no choice but to make do, he started construction at the highest part of the property. There wasn’t a lot of room to build out, so he decided to build up. A castle seemed like the best way to go. “Every man’s home is his castle,” he used to say, “and now my castle can be my home.”

Solomon called himself “the DaVinci of debris, the Rembrandt of reclamation, the wizard of odds and ends, and the savior of salvage.” Old oil drums, rebar, bicycle chains, tin cans, coat hangers, car parts, and wood and metal scraps are just some of the materials that found their way into his quirky sculptures. Townspeople used to drop off their junk at the front gate of the castle, figuring that Solomon would find a way to repurpose it, and he usually did. The castle also contains more than 80 of Solomon's handmade stained glass windows, depicting everything from nursery rhymes to the planets of the solar system.

Growing up, Alane mostly lived with her grandparents in St. Petersburg and visited her father in Ona on the weekends, but when she was 11 years old, she moved into the castle with him permanently.

“It was hard,” she confesses. “I had to ride the bus over an hour each way to school in Wauchula. We had no telephone for the first few years and the television reception was poor. We were isolated, I had no friends, and there were no paved roads back then to ride my bicycle or roller skate on. School was horrible. The townspeople didn’t know what to think of Dad. He was the only man in the entire county with a beard. They didn’t know what to make of this Jewish artist from New York.”

“Once I asked a little girl at school if she could come have a sleepover at the castle,” she continues, “and she came back and told me, ‘My mama said I can’t spend the night with you because she heard that your dad has a male nudist colony out there.’”

Eventually, Solomon had decided to try to interest members of the community in seeing his creations for themselves. Someone suggested that he stop by a local Rotary Club meeting with a few of his pieces and talk about the castle and his artwork. When townspeople started showing up on the weekends, Solomon obliged them with a personal tour. Each week, more and more people came to see the castle, and gradually word began to spread throughout Central Florida and beyond about the unusual castle in the middle of the state.

In 1990, shortly after recovering from heart surgery, Solomon began construction of a 65-foot-long replica of Spanish galleon in the swamp adjacent to the castle. That structure, which took four years to complete and was made of recycled wood, became The Boat in the Moat restaurant. A dockside patio area under shady oak trees was created to provide more outdoor seating, with a gift shop as well. 

“There was never a plan,” Alane says. “When he built the castle, he never saw it as a cute tourist attraction. He was more that guy who always says you have to just create out of whatever you’ve got and don’t throw anything away.”

Since her father’s passing in 2016, Alane and her husband Dean (whom she refers to as her “knight in shining armor”) have overseen all castle operations, and her family recipes form the basis of the menu of homemade dishes and desserts served in the restaurant.

The castle has flooded 15 times since it was built, with the worst floods coming from Hurricane Irma in 2017 (35 inches of water) and Hurricane Ian in 2022 (six-and-a-half feet of water). Hurricane Ian left a raging river of floodwaters running through the property, but the structures themselves suffered very little damage, with only two broken windows and one fallen turret that had to be replaced.

Still, between the storms and the Covid-19 pandemic, Solomon’s Castle has faced plenty of challenges staying open over the past seven years. After Hurricane Ian, staff, friends and neighbors all pitched in for the clean-up effort, vacuuming mud out of the castle, scrubbing every square inch of the buildings, cleaning all the artwork and painting the walls. “It was an opportunity to freshen everything up,” Alane says. “We were able to open back up the day after Thanksgiving—not even two months later.”

“It’s been a lot, but we’re still here,” she continues. “We have to be thankful we still have our buildings, we still have Dad’s artwork, we can still make a living, and we have wonderful friends and family that will drop everything to help us out. We are appreciative of every guest that comes.”