Historic Colorado Stone Home + a Fascinating and Tragic History

Colorado has a lot of history, and while many landmarks, buildings, and even towns remain as reminders of the past, not every story attached to these places is free from tragedy.

Read More: Historic Colorado Site a Reminder of a Dark Chapter in the U.S. |

One of the oldest stone buildings in the state has been standing for many years, and while many fond memories were made there, tragic events took place on the property as well.

Colorado's Hammar House: The Beginning

The Hammar House was built by Santa Fe Quarry owner Benjamin Hammar at its location of 203 Cantril Street in Castle Rock, Colorado, in 1881. Because Hammar had access to a plethora of materials, the house was built using handpicked gray and pink rhyolite.

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However, Hammar was also a sheepherder, and there was quite a bit of animosity from the area's dominating cattle ranchers, which encouraged the quarry owner and his wife to leave town just a few years after the home was built.

Colorado's Hammar House: The Doctor Moves In

Despite Hammar being the namesake of the now-historic house, its most famous occupant was a doctor by the name of George Alexander.

Alexander originally moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, in an attempt to treat his wife's ailing health, but she would soon pass away, prompting the widowed Alexander to move to Castle Rock.

Alexander purchased the house and practiced medicine inside its stone walls, but it wouldn't be long before tragedy struck again.

Colorado's Hammar House: Unfortunate Events

Dr. Alexander remarried after moving into the Hammar House, but his second wife would become depressed, or as the local newspaper put it, "slightly demented," after numerous failed attempts to conceive a child and eventually committed suicide by hanging in the property's barn.

One of Alexander's patients, the husband of a woman named Nina Thomas, would end up dying of Tuberculosis shortly thereafter, at which time the widow and the doctor would fall in love and marry.

Of course, the doctor's life wasn't all tragedy as he would live long enough to be named the oldest practicing doctor in Colorado by the time of his passing in 1847.

Keep scrolling to take a virtual tour of Colorado's historic Hammar House: