The other day T got home from work and suggested that we all go to check out a fancy early twentieth-century manor house outside Denver which is called, imaginatively, the Manor House. So we all hopped into the car and drove the 5 miles to check out the Coloradan version of a stately home.
It was actually less than 2 miles as the crow flies, but the Manor House is cut off from the outskirts of Denver by the 'hogbacks', a 30-mile curb of 600-foot ridges that form a sort of geological buffer between the plains and the Rockies.
Hogbacks west of Denver, courtesy of Google Earth
Anyway, because of this totally cool rock formation (which is made more cool by being packed with dinosaur fossils), we had to drive a couple of miles south to cut between two of the hogbacks. A few minutes later we were there.
The Manor House was built in 1914 by self-made man John Schaffer, born in Baltimore in 1853, who made his fortune in the best tradition of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, i.e. in railroads, grain shipping and newspapers. I tried to find something more about him on Google, but, amazingly, he doesn't seem to exist on the internet beyond the Manor House homepage. This is disappointing because I wanted to find a photo of him. I imagine he would feel at home with these guys though:
I think this was the cover art for their first album
After making his fortune, Schaffer bought a massive block of 3,500 acres in the strip between the hogbacks and the Rockies, and used it for a ranch that he named for his two sons, Ken and Caryl. On a prominent bluff in the centre of Ken-Caryl Ranch he built his own personal Xanadu, the Manor House.
Xanadu
The Manor House
Okay, so he was no Charles Foster Kane. But it was a nice southern plantation-style mansion. The best thing about it is the flagpole, which used to have a light on the top. Schaffer chose the site so he'd had a direct line of sight between two hogbacks to downtown Denver. When he was holding a party, he'd turn on the light as a sign for his friends to come. All very Great Gatsby.
Unfortunately we didn't get the chance to see much of the mansion. After parking and walking round the front to take a couple of snaps, a chunky-looking guy approached us across the lawn.
"You folks with the wedding party?" he asked.
"No," said T.
The guy shrugged. "Private property, sorry. Gonna have to ask you to leave."
T was giving up that easily. "But aren't you open 5 to 10?"
"Monday to Wednesday," he said.
T looked at him quizzically. "But isn't it Monday today?"
He paused to think. "Except today. We're closed for the wedding." He gave us a how-can-some-people-be-so-goddam-stupid look. "We put up signs, sent out an e-mail blast yesterday."
By "signs" he meant the wooden arrows we'd seen on the drive leading up to the mansion, one of which said Wedding, the other I Do's. We were tempted to point out that maybe if he wanted people to realise that the whole property was closed for a wedding, he should put out signs that actually said that. None of us was sure what he meant by "e-mail blast", either. To whom? Did he e-mail literally everyone on the planet?
Anyway, we clearly we're going to get inside the fabled Manor House, so we ambled back to the car and went home.
Never mind.
I didn't get an email from the security guard, so I doubt he emailed everyone on the planet. Maybe just everyone in America.
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