An 1880s Victorian Mansion in the Colorado Rockies: The Estemere Estate at Palmer Lake

by Edwards, Daniel

  1 Feather Picture in front room upstairs

  1 Dresser and washstand in front room upstairs both with marble top

  1 Dresser and washstand opposite front room both cherry

  1 Rocker

  1 Star Carpet

  1 Carpet (Tower room)

  4 Kitchen tables

  1 Range (Kitchen)

  4 Chairs in kitchen

  1 Dresser and washstand in Cook’s room

  1 Clothes horse

  All of the above for two hundred and fifty five ($255.00) dollars.

  OK. E. L. S.

  Received payment

  Mrs. C. A. J. Berry

  Eben Smith bought a number of pieces of furniture from Mrs. C.A.J. Berry, Thompson’s sister, for $255. Ada Thompson had sold all the furniture and the household goods left in “the Estamere House” to Clarissa Berry for $1.00 in 1891.

  Changes to Estemere circa the RMSS Era

  During the years 1926-1930, the RMSS used at least the upper floors of Estemere’s main house as dorm rooms for female students, two to a bedroom. The Carriage House loft was a dormitory for men. The Carriage House was dubbed “Pioneer Hall” and the cottage was the “Twin Pine Lodge.” The ground level of Pioneer Hall was used as an auditorium; a stage was set up and plays were presented.

  Circa 1935, the Rocky Mountain Association flyer described the Cottage as: “Twin Pine cottage, a four-room cottage with beds for twelve.” In addition, it mentions a “Cabin, three rooms, beds for six.” This “cabin” is a mystery! The only other buildings at that time that we are aware of, other than the main house, were the smokehouse/summer cookhouse and the chicken coop. Perhaps it was the cabin described by the Blietzs, below.

  The “Twin Pine Lodge” (1930)—RMSS Annual.

  “Pioneer Hall” (1929)—RMSS Annual.

  Estemere was the subject of several “Real Photo” postcards by Sanborn in the 1930s. (These postcards are quite high resolution, so on the DVD one may zoom in on the photos to study the image more closely.)

  Sanborn “Real Photo” postcards ca. 1930.

  Sanborn photo during the RMSS period.

  Sanborn “Real Photo” postcard taken above and behind Estemere after 1920 (no Rocklands Hotel).

  In the Sanborn photo above one can see the octagonal structure that may have been a water tank or the carbide house. Also, what is now the chapel (with a small room added on the back), an expansion on the Kitchen, the “smoke house/summer cookhouse” in its original location, and a small structure behind the cottage (only known photo of this unknown structure) can be seen. To the right of center on the DVD one can see some remains of the foundation of The Rocklands Hotel.

  Estemere’s Changes during Blietz’s years

  Around 1946, Blietz re-roofed Estemere using Montgomery Ward asphalt shingles. In doing so, he removed the two porches on the second floor of the main house, as well as the cresting on several of the roof lines. The upper porches were probably in bad disrepair, and W.C. did not replace them. W.C. used any materials sitting around as flashing under the new roofing shingles, including old advertising tins and empty five-gallon carbide cans (see photos in Chapter 12).

  W.C. made one of the most significant changes to Estemere’s buildings of any owner, past or present—he removed one-half of the Carriage House! When the small motel W.C. built beside the lake to accommodate stranded travelers proved insufficient, he used lumber from half of the Carriage House to build another small motel next to his first one.[184] He probably took this action due to the scarcity and expense of lumber shortly after WWII. However, the new by-pass highway quickly put an end to W.C.’s budding motel business.

  During Blietz’s time there was another small building in the NE corner of the rock-walled section of Estemere. The house was occupied by an unknown gentleman.[185] Nothing else is known about this structure.

  “Star” with the small house just visible on the far left.

  Estemere during the 1940s[186]

  The Cottage ca. 1940.

  The Carriage House ca. 1940. The right half was removed in 1947 by Blietz.

  Looking East in 1941. (r) Playing “golf” (croquet) ca. 1940. Bernice & Gene McCleary, Winnie & W.M. Metzler, Judy McCleary (child). Gene was a former mayor of Colorado Springs. Most of these trees are now gone—due to Dutch Elm Disease.

  Estemere 1941 and 2010. Little has changed in 70 years. Only the porch and chimney ( right of center) are no longer present.

  The photo below from Chapter 7 showing David Blietz feeding chickens is the only photo we have that clearly shows the Kitchen (immediately behind David) and the “Shed” that served many purposes over the years—summer cookhouse, smokehouse, icehouse, and ultimately a tool shed. We moved the Shed to its current location (across from the Cottage) in 1998 to allow for expansion of the Kitchen.

  The structure behind David Blietz is a room added onto the Kitchen.

  Dees’ Era

  In 2001, Wanda Dees sent us a photo of a chandelier that once hung in the “Observatory” at Estemere when her mother-in-law Helen Dees owned it. This was originally a gas chandelier as evidenced by the gas valves at the bottom of each globe holder. Unfortunately, the three globes are missing. It has been converted, as is the usual case, to electricity—wires have replaced the gas outlets and light bulb sockets have replaced the gas mantles. This is accomplished by drilling out the inside of the gas valve to accommodate the electrical wires.

  Chandelier removed from Estemere by Dees.

  Leon Snyder Hires Deane Delgado (1962-1964)

  In 1962, Leon Snyder hired Deane Delgado to fix up Estemere in preparation for selling the Estate. In an interview, Delgado stated that the only two pieces of original furniture in the house then were the buffet and the round poker table.[187] [We know the poker table is not original to Estemere—there is a moving sticker on its underside.] Snyder gave Deane full control over the restoration project, and once in a while came up to Palmer Lake to see how the work was progressing. However, Snyder never stayed at Estemere; he had a home in the exclusive Broadmoor section of Colorado Springs.

  Delgado did a lot of carpentry work and fixed the front porch. He also painted the interior of the house and hung wallpaper. He had found a store in Denver that stocked wallpaper designs that had been popular many years before. Estemere got a new roof, and its exterior was repainted, but Delgado hired painters from Colorado Springs to do most of that work. The foundation of the building was improved and strengthened. An outside firm handled plumbing repairs needed throughout the house. No work was done on the Carriage House.

  Delgado took great pride in the large mural he painted on the 14-foot high ceiling of the Billiard Room. The mural portrayed three goddesses: Music, Literature, and Drama. This is a rather large painting—about six by 10 feet. Deane also painted two murals on the wall of the old Roman Villa Restaurant in Palmer Lake, which are now covered over.

  During his interview, Delgado gave the reporter a tour of Estemere. He noted that the Red Room still had its original carpet and imported brocade wallpaper.[188] In the Music Room were strips of carpeting that had come from Colorado Springs’ Alamo Hotel when it was being renovated. The only furniture in the music room was a huge table that originally had been the base of an 1895 Steinway grand piano.

  In the Billiard Room, youthful vandals had caused $3,000 worth of damage to seven leaded, stained glass windows. Each window was distinct, but all had hand-etched oval center pieces [no—the high resolution 1893 photo clearly shows the medallions were originally caned stained-glass]. On either side of the room’s fireplace was a closet for billiard cues. The Smoking Room had shutters with louver boards that were hand operated. Next to the Smoking Room was the East Wing, the eastern-most bedroom added by Eben Smith for his son, Frank. The foyer and hallway had its original mahogany stair-rail, carpeting, and wall paper that looked like linen. The foyer door was the main entrance which led to 1,300 square feet (110 m2) of new veranda floor.

  The �
��Three Muses” painted by Deane Delgado in 1964 on the Billiard Room ceiling.

  The marble bathroom fixtures were gone, but a heavy chain was still anchored near one window in each bedroom. A rope or bed sheet tied to the chain would have provided an improvised 19th-century fire escape. All the bedrooms had walk-in closets, with two in the master bedroom.

  Delgado pointed out that connections for service bells were in every room of the house, but the master board had disappeared. The old tubing for the gas lights was still in order, but the fixtures had been removed long ago. The woodwork, said Delgado, was built of native Black Forest (Colorado) pine, and an old French method of staining doors with long quills had been used.

  On the third floor was a small sitting room off the Round Tower Room. A floor cupboard was used to store wood for the fireplace. The Round Tower Room had a domed ceiling with part of its original hand painted mural of stars bordered with a gold band. The rest of the ceiling had been painted over at a later date. On the fourth floor was an observation room [“widows walk”], from which a large crawl space led to a tower room on another level. This room, with tall windows, was built around the large main chimney that “was the heart of Estemere.” A perpendicular ladder and flag pole followed the chimney to the top where an ornate wrought iron fence, recently sprayed with black paint, stood atop the mansion.

  Outside were two large fountains, each with a cherub made of a very thin formed metal—probably tin—in the center. Most of the cherubs’ color paint had worn away, and one cherub was leaning at right angles to its original position, so that it appeared to be an acrobat! Delgado had managed to get the fountains operating again. From the grounds one could see five chimneys on Estemere. Delgado noted that when he first arrived, one of the chimneys was about to fall, so he took 15 feet off the top of it and used metal rods to anchor the rest. There was a wash house with a three-sectioned wooden tub along the east wall [now at the Palmer Lake Museum], with shelves for storing linens. Next to it was a small house that could have been servants’ quarters. During the RMSS days, the students used it as a shower room. A black wrought iron fence was atop the stone wall on the south side of the property. In the southeast corner was a summer house. [It is not clear what this refers to, unless it is the small cottage noted by the Blietzs, which is long gone.]

  The Leonard’s Era

  One can surmise that Don Leonard had access to old photos and postcards showing Estemere in earlier times. Therefore, he knew that at one time there was a balcony on the second floor. [When Blietz re-roofed the house in late 1949, he removed it because it was in disrepair.] Leonard restored this balcony on the second floor. Don liked symmetry, so he also added a balcony off the upstairs “master bedroom”—where no balcony had existed before! However, he did not provide a door from inside the house to this balcony—one must either climb out a window or step over the railing from the front balcony and walk around the roof to access it. Additionally, Don replaced the lions that Eben Smith’s family had removed from Estamere to place in front of Eben’s mausoleum.

  In a letter from Helen and Bryce to Don and Joan dated 01 February 1965, they state:

  The only work that I know of that Ed [Hubbard] has done is dismantle the little house by the stone wall…. I forgot to mention that Ed has removed the lean-to that was attached to the tack house. [Perhaps this was the “Shed”?]

  The “little house by the stone wall” was surely the house mentioned by the Blietz children on page 140.

  During the Leonard era, the small building used as 1) the Carbide House (?), 2) a shower room, and 3) a chicken coop—was converted into a Chapel in 1974. [This date is based upon the dated plywood used to construct the tower.] Oral history says that someone gave the Leonards a fairly large bell that they kept in the “circle” (the area encircled by the driveway in front of the Carriage House). One day a friend suggested that Don should convert the chicken coop into a chapel and add a campanile (bell tower) for the bell. To accomplish the conversion, the Leonards had to replace the floor, which had been rotted out by the chicken manure. Pews were built by Ed Hubbard, a local cabinet maker and a one-time Town of Palmer Lake’s Building Inspector; the bell tower was added for the bell, and custom stained-glass windows, which used glass similar to that used in the Billiard Room, were comissioned. Then, a song-board, lectern, and pastor’s chairs were acquired (perhaps from Mrs. Leonard’s prior antique business in Kansas). Finally, a dedication service was held. [We have no evidence that the Leonards used the Chapel after its dedication. One wedding was held in the Chapel during the Ward era.]

  After the flood of 1965, the rock wall, waterfall, and paths were added behind the main house. The Leonard’s sons would bring their friends to Palmer Lake to assist in building the rock structures. In conjunction with this, the Leonards also added a two-car garage with a small loft above and with a gazebo nearby.

  They also had to do extensive restoration work on the Kitchen and the Master Bathroom, both of which had been severely damaged by the flood. Ed Hubbard made cabinets and shelves for the Kitchen, Master Bathroom, the upstairs bathroom, and the Dining Room.

  Interior of the Chapel in 2010.

  The Chapel in 2009; Cindy & Sam Swancutt’s wedding 01 Dec 2001.

  The Leonards added the Two-Car Garage and the upper gazebo around 1974.

  The loft doors and rail were added by the Wards. Note the upper gazebo to the right of the garage.

  The lower gazebo was originally across the street in Deer Park.

  More items related to this chapter are on the DVD.

  Estemere in Winter by Jess Smith ca. 2008.

  Chapter 12

  Kim & Roger Ward Purchase and Restore Estemere

  (Exterior) (1998-2011)

  Kim and Roger Ward Purchase Estemere

  Many have asked how Kim and I came to buy Estemere. For several years we had talked about where we wanted to live when I retired from Quartzdyne. We liked Utah and our home in Park City, but we wanted to build a one-level home (because of arthritis and bad knees surely limiting our ability to climb in our later years) somewhere else. Park City winters can be rather long and the super-insulated home we designed and built there was a two-story with a walk-out basement. The new home would be a zero-upkeep house on a no-maintenance lot, like our home in Park City.

  Kim and Roger Ward during the PLHS’s 2006 Open House. Photo by Dee Kirby.

  We had several requirements: 1) it had to be within an hour of a major airport; 2) it had to be near a college; 3) it had to be within thirty minutes of a major hospital; and 4) the climate must have a moderate humidity and four distinct seasons. Very few locations met these requirements.

  In April 1997, Kim attended a meeting at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. Since we had lived in Loveland, Colorado, (about 110 miles north) from 1979-1981, Kim remembered how much we liked Colorado. But we had not spent any time around Colorado Springs, and realizing that “The Springs” met our requirements, she contacted a real estate agent to show her some raw land in the area. She immediately found several lots that she liked, so I took a long Fourth of July and we flew out to look around.

  We spent a day with the real estate agent, and then the next day we went out on our own. We looked at a lot in Palmer Lake, but it was five acres straight up a mountainside. Since it was lunch time, we went into O’Malley’s Pub (affectionately called “the Biker Bar”) and had a snack. As we left, Kim said, “I love this town. I want to grow old and die here.”

  I said, “You’ve gotta be kidding.”

  Kim wanted me to drive around town. We quickly were in front of a large stone wall with a wrought iron railing atop. Behind it was a tall, unusual yellow house with a red roof. I said, “Wow, look at this place. What’s it doing in a small town like this?”

  There was a hand-lettered “for sale” sign in front of the wall. Kim wrote down the telephone number, but we both knew we would never call it.

  About 20 minutes later, we were driving around acro
ss the Glen looking at houses and lots. A guy was watering his newly seeded lawn. Kim said, “Let’s stop and ask him about the area.” I again said, “You’ve gotta be kidding! You never want to stop and ask anyone anything!” Kim said, “He looks nice.”

  The “guy” was Dale Platt, a local developer. After answering several questions, I asked him why he was home on a work day. He said he was semi-retired and that he was taking his son and his son’s friend to Cañon City on Tuesday to look for dinosaur bones. He mentioned that his friend was the caretaker for the Estemere Estate. I asked Dale if that was the large yellow house, and he asked if we would like to see it.

  Since Kim and I like old houses and antique furniture, we jumped at the chance. We had been buying antique furniture since 1979—we did not like buying particle-board furniture that fell apart as soon as we got it home. Our Park City home was mostly furnished with antique furniture, much of which we personally had refinished and restored.