Redstone Historic District

About this property

The Redstone Historic District is located in the unincorporated community of Redstone in western Pitkin County, Colorado, in the United States. It includes the original community of Redstone as built by Colorado Fuel and Iron (CFI) for the coal miners it employed. In 1989, it was recognized as a historic district and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Redstone was originally a company town. John Cleveland Osgood, CFI's president at the time, spent lavishly to create quality housing for miners and their families, as well as various other public buildings, in an effort to forestall unionization. Architect Theodore Boal designed simple yet attractive structures by adapting various Victorian architectural styles. The district includes as contributing properties Osgood's estate, Cleveholm, and the Redstone Inn. At first, very populous and successful due to the high production capacity of the nearby coke ovens, Redstone was almost abandoned within a decade when it became too costly to transport coke from the remote community to CFI's new steel mill. A handful of residents remained, keeping Redstone from becoming another one of Colorado's many ghost towns. Some of its original buildings were demolished over the years. Eventually, the town rebounded slightly, and today it is home to a small arts community. Many of the remaining buildings have been restored, making it one of the few intact company towns remaining in the state. The district is formed by the original townsite for Redstone, using original surveyed lot boundaries on the north, south, and east. It is a strip of land running north–south along the Crystal River for a mile and a half (2.4 km). Redstone Boulevard (also County Route 3), lined with some of its original Llewellyn Westinghouse cast-iron streetlamps, is the backbone of the district. On the west, its boundary follows either State Highway 133 or the east bank of the river for roughly one mile from 242 Redstone, and the parallel point on Hill Road, in the north, the limit of the historic portion of town, to where Hawk Creek flows into the Crystal south of Osgood Castle. The 493 acres (200 ha) within those boundaries make it the largest of the four historic districts in the county. It includes 32 buildings, three structures, and one object. Most of the buildings are small wood-framed cottages; the larger buildings are primarily located along the mountain slopes. Two of the larger buildings, the castle and the Redstone Inn, are themselves listed on the Register. A bridge leads across the river to Highway 133, the only road to Redstone. Just across it is the smaller Redstone Coke Oven Historic District, the remains of the coking facilities that employed many Redstone residents during the peak of its prosperity. On either side of Redstone, mountains rise to summits over 12,000 feet (3,700 m). Their slopes are mostly undeveloped and part of White River National Forest. The eastern slopes are additionally part of the Maroon Bells–Snowmass Wilderness that separates Redstone from the county seat, Aspen, 22.5 miles (36.2 km) due east.

Location

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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