The hubbub of afternoon tea drifts from the dining room to the foyer at Glen Eyrie Castle.

If you close your eyes and allow your imagination to carry you back to the end of the 19th century, the chatter and laughter could be that of Colorado Springs founder Gen. William Jackson Palmer and his cronies fraternizing post-dinner in the library, while his wife, Mary Lincoln “Queen” Palmer, and their three daughters, Elsie, Dorothy and Marjory, confab with female guests in the music room.

Servants would bustle about attending to duties before retiring to their living quarters on the second of four floors. According to historians, the Palmers employed upward of 100 people to manage the property. These included gardeners, farriers, chauffeurs, housekeepers, cooks, butlers and maids.

“He entertained on a daily basis,” said Leah Davis Witherow, curator of history for Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. “They showed up for lunch and expected to be served food. … They’d sit in front of the fire after dinner and drink, tell stories, play music. Glen Eyrie was abuzz with people all the time.”

Now imagine, amid all this frivolity, Palmer slipping away to his phone booth in a corner of the grand foyer, with its expensive and elaborate quartersawn wood paneling and ornate ceilings, made by artisans he ferried over from Italy.

“Palmer had one of the first phones in Colorado Springs,” said Dace Starkweather, general manager at Glen Eyrie. “Only one other person had a phone, and it was the president of Colorado College.”

The two were friends, and both fancied themselves as weathermen.

In Palmer’s favorite room, the den, a makeshift weather vane is still attached to a wall. The square contraption contains four panels, each denoting a direction. Hooked to a gauge on the roof, the device would light up depending on which way the wind blew.

Palmer, always on the forefront of technology, instituted electricity in the castle the same week that it was initiated in New York City. He also built two smokestacks to avoid the sort of temperature inversions he saw in London during the Industrial Revolution, when smoke got trapped in the city during the day. To prevent a similar situation, he funneled all the smoke from the castle’s two dozen fireplaces underground for release higher on the mountain.

“He was way ahead of his time in terms of air quality and thinking about pollution,” Starkweather said.

Starkweather likes to show modern-day guests a black-and-white photo of Palmer seated in front of a fireplace with a dog at his feet.

The image is but a snapshot of the rich history that lives on at the castle.

Glen Eyrie is now owned and operated by Navigators, the international, interdenominational Christian ministry that bought the castle in 1953. In addition to the afternoon teas, which attract 30,000 visitors every year, and weekday tours, the nonprofit uses the castle and other buildings on the property as a bed and breakfast featuring 95 rooms. The ministry also offers Biblically based events and conferences.

“The city had the ability to purchase it at least twice and turned it down due to the amount of investment they knew it was,” Starkweather said.

Navigators has spent millions of dollars restoring and maintaining the site. This includes extensive flood mitigation after the 2012 Waldo Canyon fire destroyed the vegetation in Queens Canyon above the castle.

The canyon remains off-limits to the public, as do hiking trails that led to Dorothy Falls, named for one of the Palmers’ daughters, and the Punch Bowls — granite pools filled with water. The U.S. Forest Service created the closure, and Starkweather said there’s been no talk to reopen the land.

There are eight miles of trails available on the property, and anyone who makes a reservation for tea or a tour or stays overnight is welcome to hike them. Hour-long passes can be obtained from the guard shack so visitors can drive a short loop around the heavily forested, 723-acre site, with its sandstone rock formations reminiscent of those in nearby Garden of the Gods. Guests also can stop for a bite at the cafe in the 1871 Carriage House. Here they can see bricks of the original horse stalls, drainage ditches used for horse urine and the metal rings to which horses were tied.

Palmer built the Carriage House the same year he founded Colorado Springs, and moved his family onto the second floor while waiting for the first incarnation of Glen Eyrie to be built, a large clapboard building with more than 20 rooms.

The family often traveled because of Palmer’s job and eventually because of Queen’s health. She developed a heart condition in the 1880s and could no longer live at high altitude. She instead resided on the East Coast and in England with their daughters. Palmer would visit regularly.

“He was a man who was tremendously ambitious,” Witherow said. “He also had an overwhelming sense of responsibility for his employees, investors, the large extended family he was supporting. He couldn’t give up on his dream because too many people were depending on him.”

Queen died in 1894 at the age of 44, and the girls returned to Glen Eyrie. After his wife’s death, Palmer had the home torn down and rebuilt as the Tudor Revival-style stone castle it is today. A fireplace on the second floor is made with Indiana limestone from the quarry that provided materials for the Empire State Building. The hearth is so big that builders had to erect it first and then construct the room around it.

The second floor also houses Palmer’s bedroom, which is surprisingly small and features the only original pieces of furniture in the castle: his bed and two dressers. The furnishings were recovered by an antiques dealer in the 1990s and later given to Navigators.

Down the hall are the rooms once occupied by the daughters. They sold the property in 1911, two years after their father’s death.

It went through the hands of several absentee owners before being sold in 1925 to carpet manufacturer Alexander Cochran, who moved into Glen Eyrie with his family. His wife never felt comfortable in the drafty, rundown castle so Cochran built the Pink House a short walk away. He mimicked many of the same furnishings from the main home, including the quartersawn wood paneling. Today, the Pink House serves as lodging for overnight guests and a space for meetings and conferences.

After Cochran died, the castle stayed empty until the 1940s when Texas oil baron George Strake purchased the property. He and his family spent the summers there until Navigators founder Dawson Trotman acquired it.

“Over time, we’ve lost touch with who (Palmer) really was as a person, and we’ve made him into the mythical man on the iron horse (in the intersection of Nevada and Platte avenues),” Witherow said. “We expect him to be a saint or a sinner, when in truth he’s really just a human being. And he’s a lot more interesting than he’s ever been given credit for.”