At the beginning of the 1900s, Kansas City businessman Robert McClure Snyder bought over 5,000 acres and began building his dream, a magnificent European-style mansion or castle. Stone masons from Scotland supervised local men who quarried stone, hauled it to the work site, and laid the walls. The castle, stable, and water tower were built with sandstone, limestone, walnut, oak, and other materials quarried, cut, and gathered on the property. Snyder’s estate plans also included other improvements no longer in existence, and in 1906 architects’ designs for the house, barns, gates, and walkways carried an estimated cost of $250,000. The castle originally overlooked a small spring-fed lake. In the 1920s, Snyder’s sons fought unsuccessfully against construction of Bagnell Dam; the resulting Lake of the Ozarks divided the 5,000-acre estate and consumed the small lake. The 80-foot water tower housed the estate caretaker’s family on its first four floors, while a large steel tank on the fifth floor held water for the estate; vandals burned its interior in 1976, and it was reroofed and stabilized in 1999. The carriage house and stable housed the estate caretakers, 100 horses, and 30 cars, and on Oct. 21, 1942, embers from the castle fire set its roof ablaze. The castle ruins stand up the trail through the trees.