(gentle jingle) - [Steve] Redstone
castle is a mansion that was built by John Cleveland
Osgood in the early 1900s. - The castle today is one of the most important
buildings in Colorado. - A lot of it is unique
because of its location, it's really pretty remote and it certainly would
have been at 1900. - The place is famous
throughout the state and it's a precious place to us. It is the basis for
Redstones being here. - Osgood developed the
coking and coal industry. This was built to
entertain them, show his wealth and
significance to the world. - [April] It tells the story
of innovation, of industry, so Redstone Castle is
where so much of it began. - [Announcer] This
program was made possible by the History Colorado
State Historical Fund. - [Announcer] Supporting
projects throughout the state to preserve, protect,
and interpret Colorado's architectural
and archeological treasures. History Colorado
State Historical Fund, create the future
honor the past. - [Announcer] With support
from the Denver Public Library, History Colorado and
the Colorado Office of Film Television and Media with additional support
from these organizations and viewers like you. Thank you. (bright music) - Many forces drew Americans
westward after the Civil War. There's a whole movement
to reconstruct the South, but there's also a vision of how the West might be
reconfigured and reshaped in ways that would be more
beneficial to the nation and individuals. There's lots of good
reasons to come to the West after the Civil War. There's lots of good
reasons not to come: Indian presence, rights,
powers are very unsettled and it's a dangerous era. - [Narrator] While most people
risking the move to Colorado, were mining for gold and silver, Osgood recognized an
untapped resource, coal. Through it, he would
build an empire and would become the
fuel king of the West. - Osgood viewed himself as
maybe not above the law, but he said men of wealth
should really have more than one vote. They knew how to build a nation, they knew what was
best for their workers and they knew better than
the government or anyone else how to run their business. - Well, looking
back into history, the robber barons certainly
didn't call themselves that, but they did feel as though they were the
American aristocracy and also that they
knew not only better what was good for the workers, but what was good for the
government and for America. - John C. Osgood was
born in New York in 1851. - He came from some really
strong family roots, Puritans from England. However, by the time he's
nine years old, he's orphaned, both of his parents have died. And he and his other siblings,
it's said were doled out to different relatives, John raised by his Quaker
relatives in Rhode Island, puts himself through
boarding school and attends the Peter
Cooper Institute, which was like a
poor man's Harvard. - He graduated with
an accounting degree
at the age of 19, and he always said that he
wanted to present the impression that he was very driven. He would not drink because he wanted to make an
impression on his employers. He saved a lot of money. He helped his siblings with
cash and other opportunities. He then, by 1874, became the cashier of
the First National Bank in Burlington Iowa. Four years later, in
1878, he managed to buy the bankrupt White Breast
Coal and Mining Company and then his Colorado venture
would start after that. - And there was actually
some miners who, because of an avalanche,
saw a coal seam and didn't think it
had much value at all, so they sold it to John Osgood
for some very small amount, and it turned into this
huge empire enterprise. - He was a brilliant
businessman. He surrounded himself with
some of the best officials and associates around
and they worked together to establish the largest
coal industry in the West, not only in Colorado,
but in the West. - [Narrator] Osgood
would solidify his empire by creating the Colorado
Fuel and Iron Company, CF&I, which was heavily sustained
by a product called coke. Coke was the industrial
fuel for smelters and steel mills created by
purifying coal in sealed ovens. Osgood's coke ovens
operated 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. While this relentless production
was profitable to him, it was a terrible
strain on his workers. - The workers were
treated horribly and the coal barons, like
Osgood, did not follow the law. They just simply believed
that they were above the law. In many of the coal camps,
almost all of the workers who were brought
in from the 1880s on into the early years of the
20th century, were immigrant. Most of them could
not read or write, and they became virtual slaves. Many of them were forced
to build their own houses, their shacks. They built shacks out
of whatever material
they could find old scrap, sheet metal, and
old lumber that was around and they used buckets
stacked upon one another for stone pipes. The conditions were horrible. - The men, of course,
eventually want to unionize. I mean these men are
making $3 a day on coal that they've mined and
they're getting paid on just the tonnage, the coal
after it's been processed in the coke ovens. So there were some
really unfair practices. - [Narrator] Osgood refused
to let any union organizer set foot near his properties
and paid his men in scrip, currency only usable
at his company store. But after a labor
strike in 1901, the public became aware of the horrendous
conditions miners endured. Facing public outcry, Osgood
changed his management style to a social experiment
called welfare capitalism. - Osgood decided to build
the village of Redstone as a model village
to demonstrate his new industrial
government policy. At that time he
was a businessman and he was interested in
the bottom line, the dollar. He accepted the fact that
workers would be more productive if they had good
living conditions, good
working conditions, and that it was
the responsibility
of the corporation to provide good housing,
good sanitation, recreation for the miners. - Here at Redstone, with the assistance of his
sociologist, Dr. Richard Corwin, they implemented this industrial
and sociological experiment to see if providing a
better life for the worker and his family, that if they could improve
their living situations, the men would be less
likely to join a union or to want a strike
or to migrate on. - Dr. Richard Corwin,
full of ideals, talking wonderfully about
the needs of the workers he responds to public
health problems, to the sufferings of disease. He tries to get
better sanitation and there's some stuff
of real engagement with the problems of workers. - Originally, the men
that built the coke ovens and then worked at them lived
in tents behind the ovens. And then about 1899, they
would have started building the houses of some of which you
still see today in Redstone. They hired the architects and designed them
each individually with superintendents' houses. The Redstone Inn served as a
lodge for the single workers, men who didn't need
to rent a whole house. Redstone men also
had a fire station. It had a school, of really
beautiful brick building school, and a three-story
(chuckles) clubhouse with a 200-person
seat auditorium where Osgood brought in
theater and opera productions. - So the motives are to
create a better workforce for the immediate future. - And this wasn't just Redstone. The other camps
had kindergartens and they had education
programs as well, but Redstone was
really the top piece. - [Narrator] A mile
above his model town, Osgood would build his castle and it would later be known
as the Jewel of the Rockies. - It's had a number of names. It was Cleveholm Manor. It was Osgood Castle,
and then Redstone Castle. I think after he left, it kind of became the
kind of catch-all name. - The castle was
started in 1899, just as the rest of the village and was finished
by December of 1902 and it had electricity and
it became the country estate, the manor house of
the Osgoods by 1902. - The Redstone castle has
a lot of the character of the valley. The stone came from right
across the Crystal River. And so that forms the base. And then, above that, the
building rises out of the site and has this majestic
command of the front lawn. Three stories on the
front side of the house give you a really great sense of how important that
structure is in the valley. It starts out with that
Richardsonian Romanesque bass, all that heavy stone rusticated, and then it grows up much
lighter with wood framing and Tudor accents
and tower accents and shingles affirmed by
the name of Bowl and Hanoi. Architects in Denver
were hired by Osgood to design his castle. There's a little bit of debate as to which one of them
actually designed it, because Bowl was kind
of a guy who went around and had all the contacts. Supposedly Hanoi was the guy
who did most of the work. - There are many iconic
rooms in the mansion. The most notable is the
Great Room which has ceilings and were in the range
of 19 or 20 feet, gorgeous fireplace with
Osgood's crest on it. There's a gorgeous library
with dyed green leather walls. He's got an aluminum
leaf ceiling. We thought for many
years it was gold leaf, but was tested
and it's aluminum, but that was far more valuable
at the turn of the century. - The music room is
a French statement with gilded leaf mirrors that
are made from diamond dust. The dining room is more
of a Russian statement, and Russian ruby red
velvet wall cover, it's Honduran mahogany and another one of
the aluminum gold leaf looking like ceilings. - The light fixtures
in the mansion were designed by Louis
Tiffany & Company of New York, specifically for the mansion. When we bought the castle, two of them were in
the garage in pieces, April ran across them, we took
him to a lamp remanufacturer in Denver and he was was
able to remanufacture them, and our electrician was
able to get them back up. You can definitely tell the
difference between the new and the old and that
the old ones are massive in terms of weight. You just pick them up, and you know that you've
got something of value. - There was a
hydroelectric plant installed just upstream here, a small remnant of
it still exists, so it did have
electricity at 1900, when 1/2 of Denver
and New York don't. - One of the most spectacular
features of the castle, in my opinion, are the
architectural ceilings of the upper level rooms, they're referred to
as balloon ceilings that give them the sensation
of an elevated ceiling that are about 10 feet high. The normal bedroom nowadays is about eight-foot
high ceilings which just make the rooms
feel more expansive and bigger and they're rounded
around the edges and just had to take a
tremendous amount of work to be able to get them
constructed that way, especially at 1900. - Redstone Castle was
designed for entertaining from the billiards
room in the basement, with the walnut billiards table that probably weighs 4,000
pounds to the heads mounted from all their wonderful
big-game hunting, which was very manly. Many notable industrialists,
they would come out and stay in Redstone
for entertainment, to smoke cigars and shoot pool and conspire their next
moves in the industry. - One of the reasons
Osgood built the place was to entertain his peers, and his peers happen to be
J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Gould, Prince
Leopold of Belgium, was apparently documented
to have been here. I think a lot of business was
done behind closed doors here. - One of the guest rooms was
entitled the Roosevelt Suite, another one was called
the Morgan Suite. Each of the guest rooms
have their own fireplaces. There's 14 fireplaces
in the mansion, each with their
own tile or marble that was imported at the time. - The thing that's unusual to me about rubbing elbows with
these kinds of people is, we're pretty far from Denver, we're pretty far from
any large cities at all and of all the
places in the world John Osgood could have
lived, he chose to live here because it's a beautiful valley and this is the place he wanted
to show off to his guests. - The coal miners didn't
build houses like this. We believe it was mostly
Austrian stonemasons, as well as a lot of
Italian metal workers. Two of the rooms in particular
inside the building, the library and the music room, had artisans come
imported over from Europe just to do the work
in these rooms. - [Steve] The mansion
itself has 42 rooms. - We actually have 10 rooms that are under
historic easements, which means we can't change
any of the permanent fixtures, or layout, or
anything like that. But we knew that going into
it and Steve and I said, we would never
change those rooms, it's what they were, it's
what they need to be. Several of those rooms have
either original stenciling. We're in the music room now. It has original Damus
silk-type wallpaper. The dining room has red
velvet on the walls. Much of it is stenciling. It's actually stenciled
with a pineapple pattern, which is a symbol
of hospitality. - A lot of the furnishings
date back even to the Osgoods. The Sun Porch was an
addition put on in 1903. We've never seen
the original plans to know if it was
an afterthought, or always planned to be
a part of the building, but it certainly afforded them
a beautiful view year-round, of the sweeping lawns
and all of the estate. He probably even had
a pretty good view of the workings
of the coke ovens. There are marble fireplaces and marble furnishings
throughout the home, even though Osgood
owned a marble quarry, they weren't developing
the white marble here. So everything throughout
the house is a European, mainly Italian, marble and
all that was brought in. At the time, Italian marble was
the best marble in the world and that's why Osgood, who
spared no expense at furnishing and building Cleveholm would
have had Italian marble in the house. Today, we know that the Italians have bought the marble
quarry 12 miles away, because the best
marble in the world comes from marble at Colorado. - [Narrator] Osgood's
castle stood as a monument to his success and fortune, but he would not
enjoy it for long. - One of the problems
that Osgood faced was that although he
had a lot of money, he didn't have enough to
accomplish what he wanted to do. He overextended himself. - [Narrator] Facing
financial difficulty, Osgood attempted to borrow
money from John D. Rockefeller, but Rockefeller wanted control
of Colorado Fuel and Iron and Osgood agreed. Osgood maintained ownership
of the village and his castle, as they were part of
his personal estate, but the market for coal
and coke was disappearing. The coal basin
mine closed in 1909 and Redstone became
a ghost town. - Cleveholm Manor and the
other estate buildings were literally mothballed. By 1911, Osgood left,
pretty much for good and he had no desire to
leave Cleveholm he loved it. He referred to it as
his beloved residence, but he didn't spend much
time here after 1911. When he returned in 1924,
he returned to stay here and to die here. - And in 1924, after
marrying for the third time, he'll return here and spend
another million dollars refurbishing the house. - They wanted to
restore Redstone and
make it into a resort. And so they opened
up the castle again. They renovated the
infrastructure of Redstone and opened up some
of the cottages, began to think in terms
of a mountain resort. Osgood was already very sick. - He had developed a
stomach cancer by then, and it was interesting that
he chose this place to be. It would have been very
far from any kind of care that you could have gotten at
his own hospital in Pueblo, or in Denver, but he chose to
be here and died here in 1926, at the age of 75. - When Osgood died, he left the property to
his third wife Lucille. He was in his 70s, she
was in her late 20s and she had a huge
burden to take care of. It wasn't only the castle,
it was also the inn and the whole town of Redstone
were her responsibility. That was in 1926. Of course, the stock
market crashed in 1929. - Lucille would pretty
much to leave Redstone in the early 1930s. It was hard to keep
the estate going and the village
going particularly
with the depression. Lucille then would sell
Cleveholm in the 1940s. - Redstone Castle went into
this sort of holding pattern, because what do you do
with a building like that? There's not too many people
that actually fit the mold that can live in a
building of that stature. - [Narrator] The Redstone Castle would change hands many times,
with each owner attempting to revitalize the
landmark estate, each
owner falling short. With every failed attempt, the survival of the
castle was in danger. - Ken Johnson, who was publisher of the Grand Junction sentinel, with the support of Pitkin
County, put the building on the National Register
of Historic Places. So that was one of the first
steps in preserving it. - What many people don't know is that the National
Register has no teeth. It's got some wonderful
list of historic properties, but it doesn't bring
with it any legal teeth until the federal
government gets involved. - The castle has been
threatened several times, but a major threat
was in about 1974. - [Narrator] After a development
contract fell through, the castle was deemed
too costly to repair and talks of demolition
began to circulate. - It was at that nick of time that Ken Johnson bought
the castle to save it. - [Narrator] Before any federal
protections were in place, a man named Leon Harte
and a group of investors, bought the Redstone castle,
but it was seized by the IRS and the Securities
Exchange Commission after it was discovered to be part of a
nationwide Ponzi scheme. This put the fate of the
castle in jeopardy once again. They had plans of dismantling it and selling it off in pieces. A couple of significant
members of the community, Peter Martin, a
retired attorney, Darrell Mansell, retired
college professor, went after the SEC and the
Internal Revenue Service. - At that time we were
concerned that it be preserved and there was talk that they didn't have
to preserve anything 'cause they were the
federal government. I have filed a
motion to intervene in their federal
foreclosure action and I argued that
castle was subject to the Preservation Statutes, and after considerable argument, it was agreed that
they would comply with the National
Historic Preservation Act. - The Redstone Castle of today is one of the very few
buildings in Colorado that has a
conservation easement, both interior and exterior
conservation easement. We considered the placing of
the easements on the building as a major accomplishment. It took a lot of effort with the support of
the National Trust, Colorado preservation
Inc, Colorado History and the Advisory Council
on Historic Preservation. Without their help, I don't
think a small historic society would have accomplished this, so we have to give them a
great deal of credit for that. - My husband and I
and our daughters, used to drive by the
castle quite often because we had a cabin past here and it was always
so fascinating. I think everyone
dreams a little, wow, what would it be like to
live there, or to stay there? And then, as time went by the
castle diminished in value. - It was sold in 2000
for six million dollars, 2005, it sold for
four million dollars then we bought it for
two million dollars, which basically shows the
decline of the property when it wasn't used. - When we purchased the castle, the biggest concern
was the speed at which it was deteriorating and we knew we had to seriously
and quickly get a lot done and we did (chuckles). The night after we bought it,
we sat down with the architect and put a plan on a napkin, and probably 90% of
that plan came through. - We had been working
with the Carvers on their Hotel
Denver in Glenwood, and I got a call, "Nan,"
Steve Carver's on the phone, "guess what we just did." "No idea Steve. "How are you?" "Well, we just bought
Redstone Castle." And I said, "You are crazy." - I think a lot of
the owners (chuckles) realized they'd bitten off
more than they could chew, and so there was a lot of
slapstick preservation. Theories around preservation have changed
throughout the years and that's also reflected
in the Redstone Castle and how they handled
certain things. - [Steve] We went
into it with ambitions of who's going to cleaning it up and making things more
usable for the current day, but as we got into it, we decided basically to
finish the entire interior. We've touched every
wall, every ceiling and every floor in the
castle, and it's beautiful. I say it looks the best it
has since the day it opened. - The Carvers found some
really excellent craftsmen, some with our help, to restore some of the
finishes in the building, because when you talk
about embossed leather, when you talk about
Tiffany lampshades, those are the features that you don't find in every
house in Colorado for sure. So we really had to draw on
the national stable of experts to do some of the
work at the castle. - We've had restoration folks from the State
Historic Fund show up that had experience
in New York and so on. He sent us an email
later that said, "This is one of the
most respectful reuses "of a historic property
I've ever seen," so we're very proud of it. - It is very
important to preserve and maintain this building. We've heard the expression,
if walls could talk, there's so many stories
surrounding this castle, from questionable
marriages and divorces, to (chuckles) robber barons,
to immigrant stories. The legacy of the castle, the thing that needs
to be passed on to
the next generation, it's a place to
tell those stories and make the stories come alive and there are great
number of stories. - Why is it important to
save the Redstone castle? But there's so
much context there from the social, to the
economic, to architectural and everything about the
architecture up there, captures this message that Osgood was kind
of desperate to tell and to share with the
rest of the country. - The castle today is one of the most important
buildings in Colorado. It, along with the village,
reflects a period of history that I don't think
can be understood without the physical evidence. It was a period of the
industrialization of Colorado. And to have people come
in and visit the place, they can understand how the
industrialization of the West was accomplished. Without this physical evidence,
you go to a history book and you can get some
information from a history book, but you don't get the feeling,
you don't get the spirit. - Occasionally we're approached
by friends and relatives and even our daughters as to, why are you guys doing this? And my classic response is
that I just have this vision to how beautiful it's going
to be whenever we get done and so far it is not
surprised me wrongly, it's been everything I
expected and then some. It's just a beautiful
place to be. (bright music)
