Greencrest Manor: Battle Creek’s remarkable secret

Posted by Bill on Wednesday, May 5, 2010   |   4 Comments

When I turned onto the long paved drive between the twin brick pillars flanked by huge wrought iron gates, I was pretty sure I was in for a treat. When Kathy VanDaff swung open the over sized front door and welcomed me inside, I knew for sure.

“When we started, there were no doors, no windows, no fireplaces, no light fixtures—nothing,” she said with a wave of her hand. We were standing in the entrance hall with its original terrazzo floor. A staircase swept up toward the second floor in a graceful arc.

“That was 1987. My husband Tom and I had to put everything back together again. We opened to guests in 1989. We weren’t done, of course, but we had enough restored that we could begin to welcome guests.” The rest of the eight guest rooms came into service over the next few years after the 1989 opening.”

When I asked about the name, Kathy answered with a laugh. “The man who sold it to us didn’t tell us it was about to be condemned. We came one day, and there was a condemned sign on the door. It mentioned the property ‘commonly known as Greencrest Manor.’

“That was the first time we had heard the name, and we thought, well, that will make a good name for a bed and breakfast. It’s been Greencrest Manor ever since.”

Nellie’s labor of love

The Manor began life as the dream home of George Burt and his wife Nellie. Burt was the son of Michigan lumber baron Wellington R. Burt and one of Battle Creek’s most prominent residents. He came to Battle Creek to pursue a business career. His wife was the former Nellie Zinn from Lafayette, Indiana.

The couple vowed to build a home on their favorite picnic spot overlooking St. Mary’s Lake, a location just a few miles north of the city. Sadly, Burt died during the course of purchasing the property.

However, Nellie carried on and eventually fulfilled the dream by building the Manor in 1935. The house is French-Normandy in style, and she surrounded it with formal gardens.

In the early 1960s, the Catholic Church bought the estate and turned it into a seminary. “The Catholics had a chapel on the first floor,” Kathy explained. “Classrooms were on the second, and the third floor was a dormitory. They had 40 priests here.”

The Catholics eventually sold the property, and that’s when the real decline began. “Everybody had big dreams, so they tore things out, but never managed to put them back together. By the time we arrived, there wasn’t much left.” Kathy estimates that the house sat empty for five to eight years.

Restoring the Manor to glory

“I was amazed at how poor the condition was for it being only about 50 years old.” While it’s true that a lot of the cosmetic features were destroyed, the basic body of the house was intact. Little wonder. The building is made entirely of concrete, and the exterior walls are 18 inches thick.

“The original builders owned a cement company,” Kathy said by way of explanation. “There is practically no wood in the house. There are the rafters under the slate roof, and doors, of course, but that’s about it.”

Speaking of doors, the Van Daffs had to build them all from scratch. All of the windows were broken, and Tom Van Daff replaced 450 individual panes of glass.

Tom and Kathy were no strangers to big house projects, having already restored a large five-bedroom home. They bought Greencrest Manor as an investment and originally envisioned it as a private home, but they decided to turn it into a bed and breakfast to help defray the costs of restoring and maintaining the 12,000-square foot mansion and its 15 acres of grounds.

“When we sold our other home, we had what we thought was a tidy sum to work with. This house had three new boilers, but they were not connected. That was our first big job, and it took half of our working capital.”

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