Dr. Bell 1872
Ferninand 1890
McClurgs 1972
Chef Sigi 1974
Sally Thurston 1996
Joce & Ross 2026
The Story So Far…
Some places are built. Others seem to spend a century and a half becoming.
Long before anyone called this place The Manor, before there were guest rooms tucked beneath the oaks, before breakfast arrived at bedroom doors and travelers carried tiny computers in their pockets, this little stretch of land along Fountain Creek was already collecting stories. Quite a few of them, as it turns out.
There have been Englishmen and gardeners. Railroad men and restaurateurs. A Wild West wax museum. A water witch. An eighty-foot geyser nobody ordered. An artist who decided she might as well become a general contractor. Hundreds of weddings. Thousands of travelers. And now, somehow, us.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves, pull up a chair. This story begins well before The Manor had a name.
First Came the Dreamer
Dr. William Abraham Bell
In the 1860s, a young Irish-born, Cambridge-educated Englishman named William Abraham Bell came west with a railroad survey. He was trained in medicine, though history had rather larger plans for him.
Bell became the friend and business partner of General William Jackson Palmer, and together they helped shape an extraordinary chapter of Colorado’s early development. Bell became involved with the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and, in 1872, helped establish the community that would become Manitou Springs.
His vision was wonderfully ambitious.
Bell imagined a European-style health resort beneath Pikes Peak: mineral waters, mountain air, gardens, parks, handsome villas and elegant hotels. Essentially, an English resort town dropped rather unexpectedly into the Colorado wilderness, and somehow, it worked.
Manitou became known as the Saratoga of the West. Visitors arrived seeking the mineral springs, the mountain air and perhaps a bit of reinvention.
Bell reserved a country estate for his own family along Fountain Creek. He called it Briarhurst, and part of that estate is the land upon which you are standing today.
Then Came the Gardener
Ferdinand Schneider
Great estates require grand visions. They also require someone willing to put their hands in the dirt. For Briarhurst, that man was Ferdinand Schneider.
Ferdinand tended the estate’s grounds, planting fruit orchards, flowers and gardens along this stretch of Fountain Creek. More than a century later, traces of the landscape he cultivated could still be recognized here.
And Ferdinand’s story became part of the property in another rather lovely way. His youngest daughter, Madeline Schneider, married here in the gardens in 1915. Nearly a century later, in June 2006, Ferdinand’s great-great-granddaughter Elaine returned to this same property to be married. Different century. Same family. Same ground beneath their feet. That is the sort of history we love most. Not history trapped behind glass. History that comes back.
The West Gets a Little Wilder
The McClurg Years
Eventually, the eastern portion of the old Briarhurst estate separated from the manor house, and, because Manitou Springs has never been particularly interested in being ordinary, the property eventually became home to the Buffalo Bill Wax Museum.
The museum was owned by Roy McClurg and became a longtime Manitou attraction, filled with more than 100 wax figures depicting outlaws, pioneers, statesmen and characters of the American West.
One imagines the old Bell carriage house had opinions about this development. Unfortunately, it has declined to comment. But the McClurg chapter gave this property one of our favorite stories.
In 1978, McClurg wanted a well. Naturally, he hired a water witch, because apparently that was an option. A dowser named Claude Taylor selected the location with his witching rod, and drilling began. At 635 feet, the earth answered. Violently.
Warm, sulfur-scented mineral water erupted from the ground in a geyser reportedly reaching 80 feet into the air, hurling rocks and pouring so much mineral-rich water into Fountain Creek that a downstream Colorado Springs water-treatment facility had to be shut down.
McClurg had wanted a trout pond and fountain. Manitou gave him a geological event instead. The well was eventually capped, or at least everyone rather hoped it was. Remember that. It becomes important later.
Meanwhile, Next Door…
Chef Sigi Krauss
The old Briarhurst estate had been divided, but history doesn’t pay much attention to property lines.
In 1974, celebrated local chef Siegfried “Sigi” Krauss purchased Briarhurst Manor next door.
A year later, he transformed Bell’s former family estate into a fine-dining destination. For decades, Briarhurst became synonymous with hospitality in the Pikes Peak region. Dining rooms replaced drawing rooms. Guests once again crossed the grounds dressed for an occasion. Celebrations returned. The estate was doing what it had done since Bell first imagined it: welcoming people.
Chef Sigi’s legacy reached far beyond the manor. His influence helped shape generations of chefs in the Pikes Peak region, and his culinary archives are now preserved by the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.
Different keeper. Different century. Same instinct. Making something remarkable here.
Then a Woman Saw an Old Barn
Sally Thurston
By the mid-1990s, the Buffalo Bill Wax Museum’s chapter was ending. Enter Sally Thurston.
Sally was a Colorado native who had spent nearly three decades on the East Coast working as an artist and craftsperson. In 1995, longing for the mountains, she decided it was time to come home.
She wasn’t initially looking for an inn. She was looking for studio space.
But her search kept bringing her back to an overgrown property along Fountain Creek with an old carriage house, a scrub-oak hillside and a rather enormous 9,000-square-foot former wax museum. Something about it refused to let her go.
And somewhere along the way, the thought appeared: Perhaps a bed and breakfast.
Which is generally how dangerous ideas begin. Sally bought the property in 1996.
She envisioned three new lodging buildings nestled into the hillside, designed to echo the Gothic Revival character of Bell’s old carriage house.
Then she discovered she needed a general contractor. So, Sally did the obvious thing. She went down to El Paso County, took the contractor’s examination and became one of the relatively few females licensed general contractors in the Pikes Peak region at the time.
Problem solved.
She designed the buildings. She built the inn. She hand-crafted and hand-painted the suites. She created hand-painted tile work and fantastical rooms unlike anything found in an ordinary hotel, and she called it Blue Skies Inn. She created hand-painted tile work and fantastical rooms unlike anything found in an ordinary hotel, and she called it Blue Skies Inn.
For nearly thirty years, Sally welcomed travelers into the strange, colorful little village she had imagined beneath the trees.
But remember that forgotten well? It remembered Sally.
In 2007, the old McClurg well began leaking.
The supposedly plugged mineral well beneath the property became a serious concern because of its connection to Manitou’s unusual aquifer. What followed involved engineers, hydrologists, regulators, enormous expense and the unsettling realization that a geological problem from 1978 had patiently waited nearly three decades to introduce itself to the next owner. Old properties are like that, they occasionally come with unfinished business. Sally stayed.
She preserved the carriage house. She tended Ferdinand’s gardens. She built a business. She hosted weddings. She cooked breakfasts. She welcomed generation after generation of travelers. And for three decades, she became another keeper of this peculiar little piece of Manitou.
And Then Came Us
Jocelyn & Ross
In 2026, the keys changed hands once again, but our road to The Manor began long before we ever held them.
We are both Culinary Institute of America-trained chefs, having studied at the CIA in Hyde Park, New York. Jocelyn found her calling in baking and pastry; Ross in the culinary arts.
Which is perhaps a rather elaborate way of saying that we have spent most of our adult lives feeding people.
In 2017, we opened Iron Tree Restaurant & Funky Town Brewery, building a restaurant and brewery from the ground up and learning—as most hospitality people eventually do—that owning a restaurant requires equal parts cooking, stubbornness, creativity, questionable amounts of caffeine, and the ability to repair things one has absolutely no qualifications to repair. Apparently, we enjoyed the punishment.
In 2020, we opened Costello’s Coffee House, tucked inside a historic Victorian home, and our love affair with old buildings, good food, peculiar details and places with stories of their own only grew.
For years, hospitality was our life. Then life asked something different of us.
Jocelyn’s father, Keith, was living with ALS.
Businesses can be rebuilt. Opportunities can come again, time cannot. So, we made the decision to sell what we had built and step away so Jocelyn could spend the time that remained with her dad.
It was one of the hardest chapters of our lives, and one of the easiest decisions we ever made. Before he passed, there was another place Jocelyn had begun dreaming about. An unusual little inn in Manitou Springs.
She showed her dad photographs of the property. He never had the chance to walk the grounds himself, but he knew his daughter well enough to understand what she saw in it, and he gave her his blessing.
To Jocelyn, that mattered more than any inspection, spreadsheet or business plan ever could, because she adored her dad. And somehow, knowing that he had seen the dream, even if only through photographs, meant that a small piece of him had already been here.
After losing him, however, dreaming about the future became considerably harder, The Manor was still there, so was Sally.
Jocelyn had always loved Sally and admired what she had created here over nearly thirty years. Eventually, while finding her way through grief, she reached out, and Sally welcomed her with open arms.
And then there was Ross, her husband, business partner, fellow chef, professional co-conspirator, and, when necessary, the person willing to remind her of the dreams she was too frightened or heartbroken to chase herself.
Ross pushed, Jocelyn hesitated, Ross pushed some more, and somewhere between grief, terrifying paperwork, old buildings, a great deal of faith and what can only be described as our longstanding inability to choose the easy route… We did it.
After roughly thirty years under Sally’s care, Blue Skies Inn became ours, and suddenly we were standing on 2½ acres of Manitou Springs history holding a set of keys and wondering: Now what? We had a decision to make. We could erase what came before us, or we could listen to it.
We chose to listen.
We renamed the property The Manor, but our intention was never to make its history disappear beneath something shiny and new, quite the opposite.
We became fascinated by it. Dr. Bell, Ferdinand, the orchards, the carriage house, the McClurgs and their wax cowboys, the water witch, Chef Sigi, Sally, the weddings, the floods, the gardens.
The strange little clues left behind by people who could never have imagined the two of us standing here today.
And slowly, we realized something, we aren’t the beginning of The Manor’s story. Nor do we want to be, we are simply the people holding the keys now. After all, The Manor was never ours to begin, it belongs to the story. We’re simply fortunate enough to write the next chapter.
And perhaps, in some small way, one of the people who helped put those keys into our hands never had the chance to hold them himself.
So, this chapter is ours, but a little bit of it will always belong to Jocelyn’s dad, too.
Now it is our turn to care for this peculiar, beautiful old place, to uncover its stories, preserve the pieces that matter, breathe life into the pieces that have been forgotten, feed a great many people, probably fix a great many things we are still not qualified to fix, and leave something worthwhile behind for whoever holds the keys next.
A New Chapter, Written in Old Ink
That idea became the heart of what we’re creating here. The three guest houses now take their inspiration from the sorts of characters who might have wandered through an estate like this:
The Horticulturist’s Quarters, a nod to Ferdinand and the gardeners who coaxed orchards and flowers from Colorado soil.
The Wayfarer’s House, for the travelers, adventurers and curious souls who have been making their way toward Manitou for generations.
And, The Noblemen’s Retreat, a wink toward Bell’s English-country-estate ambitions and the wonderfully eccentric world of Victorian gentlemen, explorers and society.
Inside them you’ll find names like, The Rosarium, The Oast House, Old Pippin, The Fernery, The Traveller’s Chambers, The Grand Tourist, The Society Room, The Explorer’s Cabinet, The Founder’s Residence, and the Huntsman’s Study.
They aren’t meant to recreate 1873, that would require considerably worse plumbing. Instead, they are our way of allowing the past to remain present.
Cheers to Those Who Came Before Us
Here’s to the dreamers, gardeners, builders, chefs, artists, cowboys, water witches, and wonderfully stubborn souls, who came before us.
Bell dreamed it. Ferdinand planted it. The McClurgs made it wonderfully strange. Chef Sigi kept hospitality alive. Sally gave it heart.
And somehow, their stories handed us the keys.
So, for however long they’re ours, we’ll keep the old stories breathing, go looking for the ones that got lost, cause just enough trouble to earn ourselves a paragraph, and leave The Manor a little more interesting than we found it.
One day, someone else will hold these keys. We hope they find our names, wonder what the hell we were thinking, and raise a glass anyway.
Until then, the lights are on, the gardens are growing, the old carriage house is still standing, and the ledger has plenty of blank pages.
Welcome to The Manor, come make a little history with us.
Cheers, darlings 🥂
Jocelyn & Ross
Keepers of The Manor