Glen Eyrie: Palmer's Castle in the Canyon

The canyon sits just north of downtown, where Queen's Creek cuts through red sandstone walls into a narrow valley of cottonwoods and ponderosa pines. General Palmer found it in the early eighteen seventies while laying out his city and decided immediately that it was where he would live. He built his first house there in eighteen seventy-one, a large clapboard structure with more than twenty rooms.

As his railroad fortune grew, he modified and enlarged it, adding a stone tower in eighteen eighty-one and remodeling the exterior to look more like the English country houses he admired. After he sold the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad in nineteen oh one, he undertook a full transformation: tearing down the clapboard portions and replacing them with stone quarried from the estate itself, building out to sixty-seven rooms in a Tudor Revival style with Gothic tower elements, installing an elevator, an electrical generation plant, a built-in fire suppression system, and a telephone. His valet, Johnny Mathys, later said that Palmer had been inspired by Loseley Park, a Tudor manor in Surrey, England.

Palmer named the property Glen Eyrie, which is an archaic spelling of eyrie, meaning the nest of a hawk or eagle. The canyon is indeed home to raptors. His wife Mary Lincoln Mellen, whom he called Queen, disliked the climate and left Colorado for good.

Palmer lived at Glen Eyrie alone for most of his later life, surrounded by guests, friends, and the canyon he loved. He died there in nineteen oh nine, not long after a fall from a horse left him paralyzed. The Navigators, a Christian organization, have owned the property since nineteen fifty-three.