Our house in Spring Lake...where I lived for my first seven years .

Our house in Spring Lake...where I lived for my first seven years was on the Grand River, on a dead end road.  Around the corner there was a house that appeared to be land locked, except for a 'float bridge' that my Father forbid us to walk on. On the other side of the float bridge was a large square house 

that we called 'the castle.'  The photo here is real...this IS the house.  I got inside the house once...after the death of the home's residence...a painter whose name was Lew Cross.  There were huge murals inside....and I don't know if they were framed...or painted on the wall.  And...during visits to antique stores in the area...I couldn't get people to 

remember this. Just now googleing around I came across the story.....wowow....it all came rushing back...the girls in this entry could have been my sister and her friend.  As follows...from the internet.  The photo is real.

It was the late 1940s, and the mossy, sometimes mushy ruins of the old wooden 

“float” bridge on Deremo Bayou was a great place to catch turtles.

Betty Kammeraad Dobbie and a girlfriend, young teenagers at the time, would pack a lunch and pedal their bicycles out to the end of 144th Avenue, the border between Spring Lake and Crockery townships.

From their spot near the edge of the bayou off the Grand River, the girls would stare up at a looming concrete-block “castle,” ivy-covered and enveloped by trees.

Rows of small, evenly placed concrete mounds — actually birdhouses — lined the perimeter of the flat roof.

“It was very spooky to look at that big house,” Dobbie recalled.

The man who lived there, Lewis L. Cross, made all of the concrete blocks and built the home himself, starting in 1910. It took him four years to finish.

“We never saw him,” Dobbie said, “but as kids we were quite fascinated by the story about the man who built the castle. We heard he painted and was a recluse.”

Dobbie was to learn more about Cross later when she served as director of Grand Haven’s Tri-Cities Historical Museum, which had some of the artist’s paintings and biographical material. She said Cross produced 500-600 paintings during his lifetime.

Born in 1863 near Davison, Mich., Cross moved to the Spring Lake area with his parents in 1871. He never married.Cross had little formal art training and actually made his living as a fruit grower, outdoorsman and taxidermist.

He sold few paintings and thought of his art as a hobby. Many of his paintings were sold at auction after his death in 1951. Some were donated to museums and a number stayed with relatives and friends.  Typically, his paintings were of wildlife, hunting and fishing, marine subjects and local historical events, including an 1883 logjam on the Grand River.

Cross once was quoted as saying “Maybe my work isn’t artistic, but it is historical.”

However, Cross left behind an intriguing and powerful legacy — large landscape paintings filled with passenger pigeons, a North American bird that was hunted to extinction. The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo.

    Cross lived on the top floor of his castle and also had his studio there. The middle floor often was used for fruit storage.

“He had easels all over, and he had several paintings going at the same time. One would have wet paint, and another would be laid out, ready to paint,” Cross loved to paint large pictures. Dobbie said he designed a roller system between two rooms in the studio/living quarters that allowed him to roll his largest paintings up in the ceiling for storage. Paintings once lined the walls of the castle as well.

The man  known as “Lew” was an eccentric but “gentle man,” who would often tell stories.  Lewis Cross, in ill health at age 88, committed suicide with a 12-gauge shotgun in 1951, according to a newspaper account.

“He was found dead at the foot of the stairs (to the studio),”  

  She believes he did not want to be a burden to anyone.