Redstone History Re-lives the Industrialization of the West
The miners, who worked the steep tunnel mines, lived and worked in Coal Town located 8 miles up Coal Basin. The Highline railroad brought the coal to the Redstone ovens to be baked into high grade coke then shipped to Pueblo to fuel Osgood’s steel mills.
The 200 workers who lived in Redstone manned these coke ovens. The coal, arriving by narrow gage train, was sorted in the tipple then hauled by mule, shoveled into the ovens from above, and fired up to 2000 degrees F. for 48 hours to burn off the impurities — Redstone was no environmental paradise!
Cleveholm Manor, now known as Redstone Castle, was Osgood’s 42 room palatial home on 500 acres with a Gameskeeper to manage the diverse herd of elk and deer.
Paintings by Jack Roberts
reproduced courtesy of the Redstone Art Foundation
Were it not for its spectacular scenery and the grand buildings, Redstone might have fallen into disrepair to become just another Colorado ghost town.
Fortunes won, lost and consumed
John Cleveland Osgood, the sixth richest and most private of the elite industrialists known as the Robber Barons, was the King of Coal in the West. He built Redstone to give substance to his business ideas – a perplexing mix of feudalism, capitalism and industrial paternalism.
Completed in 1902 at the cost of almost $3 million, Redstone was the utopian coal town with the castle for Osgood and his succession of three wives, the Redstone Inn for the bachelor cokers (coke oven workers), 88 cottages for the cokers’ families; a Club House with a theater, a school, a library, a lodge, a community garden and stables. Each family had a garden and cow. Workers were required to bathe before entering town. There were no brothels, alcohol was only served in the Club House.
The men and boys who built the 200 coke ovens
The West was built on the backs of these immigrant workers who toiled in dangerous conditions. The Redstone experiment was a brief exception.
. . . But this industrial utopia was short lived, the mines closed in 1909. In 1924 Osgood returned to his “castle” with Lucille, his third wife, to re-develop Redstone as a resort but he died before its completion. Lucille inherited Osgood’s entire estate and attempted to run the Redstone Inn as a resort hotel, but the Great Depression fairly guaranteed its failure. By 1941 Redstone had a population of fourteen.
In 1924, Lucille Osgood had 200 workers transform the abandoned village into a resort.