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The grand structure has been a private residence and a Catholic boarding school. It was a potential safe house — the story goes — for the deposed Shah of Iran, and it caught the attention of Larry Flynt.
Today, the Mansion at Elfindale is a bed and breakfast owned by Cornerstone Church.
Situated off South Fort Avenue near West Sunshine Street, Elfindale was completed in 1892. John O'Day, who bought the 400 acres that originally surrounded the residence, built the home for his second wife, Alice.
An Irishman by birth, O'Day was an attorney who was married to his first wife for 22 years. They met in Wisconsin where he practiced law. They moved to Springfield, where O'Day made a name for himself as a lawyer, and the couple had two surviving children.
O'Day was a well-to-do attorney and railroad man by the time he married Alice.
"He built this as a 'honeymoon cottage,' I think, for his new bride," says Myra Skiles, the mansion's event planner who's been on the job for 27 years.
The stone for Elfindale was quarried on-site, and German masons were imported for the work. The finished home had 27,000 square feet, 35 rooms, seven bathrooms, three floors plus a fourth-story tower and a full basement. A four-story barn that burned in the 1960s was once the largest in Missouri, Skiles says.
The O'Days entertained on the first floor and counted Missouri's governor among their guests. Alice liked to gaze out the breakfast room — now the Governors Suite — at the property's lake where she envisioned elves among the mist. Thus the name Elf-in-Dale.
The couple lived on the second floor, where each maintained a bedroom, as was customary. Alice's sitting room and bedroom had a private hallway. John's room was large, and his original 6-foot claw tub remains.
"They had the neatest things for that period of time," Skiles says. "He was a wealthy man."
The staff lived on the third floor. The back staircase ran from top to bottom, while the main staircase went only to the second floor; servants were not expected to use it. During renovations and to meet modern fire codes, the main staircase was extended.
When Alice's spending wouldn't stop, she and John divorced after 13 years. He quickly remarried and died six months later. Alice got the house but eventually had to sell it when she ran out of money. Sisters of the Visitation Order, a cloistered order, bought Elfindale and opened St. de Chantal Academy for Girls in 1906. The sisters built the red-brick monastery next door and the L-shaped chapel.
By the mid-1960s, the school closed and became a retreat. In 1978, a small group of Iranians bought Elfindale as a potential safe house for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who would be deposed the next year.
In 1982, while being treated at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners during his incarceration for tax fraud, Larry Flynt noticed Elfindale and considered buying it.
Meanwhile, through an agreement with the Iranian owners, Cornerstone Church had been using the property to meet. Eventually, a developer bought most of the remaining property, and the church bought Elfindale and its buildings.
After extensive renovations — nothing had been done inside in a long time — the Mansion at Elfindale opened as a bed and breakfast in 1990
