Colorado community rallies to save Victorian castle that helped shape the Gunnison Valley

Tucked among the trees on the edge of town in Gunnison, Colorado, a turreted Queen Anne Victorian rises from the landscape in a way that stops people in their tracks. The locally quarried stone, hand-shaped and hammer-detailed, speaks to a level of craftsmanship that architect Jody Reeser says is simply gone.

"They don't build 'em like this anymore, certainly not," she said.

Locals call it the Hartman Castle, and for good reason. The story behind its walls stretches back to the very founding of Gunnison itself.

CBS Colorado is proud to work with Colorado Preservation, Inc. to recognize Hartman Castle as we celebrate 150 years of Colorado statehood, and highlight the efforts of volunteers working to ensure Hartman's next chapter is as inspiring as its past.

Alonzo Hartman arrived in the valley on Christmas Day 1872, riding into a blizzard to take over a cow camp near the confluence of the Tomichi and Gunnison rivers. The camp had been established to feed roughly 2,500 Ute Indians living at the nearby Los Pinos agency. There was no town of Gunnison yet, no Crested Butte — nothing, according to retired Western Colorado University professor Duane Vandenbusche.

Over the next several years, Hartman built up a cattle herd, dug an irrigation ditch, established a dairy and constructed a fish hatchery. When the 1873 Brunot Agreement pushed the Utes further southwest, Hartman stayed. When silver was discovered and miners flooded the region in 1879, he was ready.

"That's how all these ranchers made out like bandits in the early days," Vandenbusche said.

The railroad reached Gunnison in 1881, and the town boomed. Around that time, Hartman met Annie, a newly arrived court clerk who had come west partly on the advice of her doctors. It proved a consequential introduction.

"Alonzo went out of his way to court her, and they were a pretty dynamic couple," said Pamela Williams, president of the Hartman Castle Preservation Corporation.

Annie Hartman became a significant figure in her own right. She helped build a thriving local arts community and was a founding member of the Monday Afternoon Club, a women's organization that Williams said was among the groups that eventually fed into the suffrage movement.

In 1891, the Hartmans began construction on the house that would bear their name. Annie, an accomplished painter, designed it alongside the couple's minister. The result was a stately Victorian complete with turrets, detailed brickwork and enough grandeur that Gunnison has called it a castle ever since.

It quickly became a social center -- the site of Christmas dances, Cattleman's Days celebrations and meetings of the county's women's organizations.

The Hartmans sold the ranch in 1911 to pursue business ventures further west. Over the following century, the house changed hands repeatedly, serving at various points as student housing and a restaurant. It has sat vacant since 2017.

Now a preservation group is racing to raise the money needed to save it. Williams described the moment the effort began in earnest as a swift pivot from excitement to alarm.

"At first it was like, 'Oh my gosh, we're going to get to buy the castle!'" she said. "And then it was like, 'Oh my gosh, we're going to get to buy the castle?'"

Reeser, who has assessed the structure, said the underlying construction has held up reasonably well given its age and vacancy. Restoring it, the group hopes, would do more than preserve a piece of local history.

"It's going to be something that's an economic driver, and Gunnison really needs that," Williams said.

Vandenbusche, who has spent his career studying the region's history, put it more simply.

"I hope it will go back to the good old days when it was the center of Gunnison -- and can host weddings and meetings and parties and gatherings," he said.