Crawford House, Steamboat Springs
Near Steamboat Springs, Colorado
The stone house on the hill above Steamboat Springs was built by the man who founded the town. James Harvey Crawford arrived here in eighteen seventy-four and built himself a log cabin. He stayed. He became Steamboat's first mayor, first postmaster, first school superintendent, and eventually a state legislator. His wife, Margaret, was known as the Mother of Routt County.
In eighteen ninety-three Crawford began construction on a more permanent home, a Romanesque Revival structure made from local stone. The mason Charles Briggs used five thousand stones in the walls, though only about sixteen hundred seventy-five are visible from the outside. The house stood as the Crawford family's primary residence for thirty-six years and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is one of the rare Romanesque Revival residences in the region and a surviving marker of the founding generation of Colorado's high-country towns.
