Westminster Castle: The Princeton of the West That Never Was
Near Boulder, Colorado
Rising a hundred and seventy-five feet above the suburban flatlands north of Denver, the red sandstone tower of Westminster Castle is one of the most incongruous sights on the Front Range, a Richardsonian Romanesque landmark that began as an act of Presbyterian ambition and survived through a succession of improbable reinventions.
In eighteen ninety, a New Yorker named Henry Mayham commissioned architects to design what he called the Princeton of the West. The plan was grand: a nondenominational Presbyterian university on the outskirts of Denver, drawing on the same educational tradition that had produced the great eastern colleges but rooted in the frontier West. The main building, completed in eighteen ninety-three, was quarried from local red sandstone and rose in towers and turrets above the surrounding prairie. It could be seen for miles.
Financial trouble from the panic of eighteen ninety-three delayed the opening by fifteen years, and the university did not actually open its doors until nineteen oh eight, drawing students from across Colorado and the region. It operated for less than a decade before the First World War changed everything. Enrollment collapsed as young men left for the front, and by nineteen seventeen the school had effectively closed. The building stood empty on its hill for three years.
In nineteen twenty, the property was purchased by the Pillar of Fire Church, a Holiness denomination founded by a Methodist minister named Alma White, who had broken with mainstream Methodism over issues of faith and authority. White's organization bought the castle for forty thousand dollars and reopened it as Belleview Schools. The radio station KPOF, which the church established and which is still broadcasting today, began transmitting from the tower.
The castle has remained in the hands of the Pillar of Fire Church and Belleview Christian Schools ever since. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-nine. The building still looms over the suburban grid that has grown up around it, a monument to a frontier dream of a great western university that the frontier simply couldn't sustain.
