Applied Worldwide has partnered with the Hartman Castle Preservation Corporation in their historic preservation efforts near Gunnison, Colorado. We are honored to be a part of this project and are excited to share a little about the project generally as well as some of the expertise we bring as applied sociologists.
Hartman Castle Preservation Project
The Hartman Castle Preservation group describes their project on their website as honoring the past while preserving for the future. Specifically, they mention:
“We are a grassroots, non-profit organization dedicated to saving the historic Hartman Castle. We are fortunate that we have been offered the opportunity to buy the home on its existing location, along with two additional historic buildings. Once restored, the site will once again be a Gunnison treasure, to be enjoyed for generations to come.”
Applied Worldwide’s Contributions
At Applied Worldwide have played several roles in this project over the past couple of years. We happened to be working with one of the founding board members on her business when they first started their journey of working to register a non-profit that would serve to preserve the castle. The “castle” is actually the historic home of the Hartman family, whose patriarch, Alonzo, is credited with helping establish the town of Gunnison on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains in the late 1800s. The castle was designed based on family matriarch Annie’s drawings and is a local landmark in the area that has unfortunately been neglected by the community time and time again after many efforts to restore it.
However, with the founding of Hartman Castle Preservation Corporation (HCPC), there is a newfound hope for restoring and preserving the historical landmark for future generations to enjoy, learn from, and find meaning in. As digital media strategists and applied sociologists, we have taken a digital sociology perspective to help this non-profit utilize our modern media tools to gain momentum for the project in their community and across the state.
Media Campaigns
One of the first media campaigns we ran for Hartman Castle Preservation group was related to their chance to win their very own audience choice episode on Rocky Mountain PBS series, Colorado Experience, all about the castle. The campaign lead up to a “March Madness” style bracket elimination voting process that took place on Facebook and Instagram. The main objective of the campaign was to establish a strong social media presence for the non-profit so potential voters could see the value in voting for them to have their own episode.
To establish that presence, we took a sociological perspective on historic preservation to highlight the ripple effect it can have on communities. In other words, we showcase the various latent functions historic preservation serves in our communities, such as driving economic development through heritage tourism and job creation. After multiple rounds of voting, Hartman Castle beat out the other seven contestants and won the episode which is set to air November 7th, 2024.
Another example of a very different media campaign we ran for the non-profit was a video for the Jumbotron at Gunnison’s annual rodeo, Cattlemen’s Days. The video could only be 30 seconds long, which meant we had to get the audience’s attention, communicate our message, provoke emotion, and ask for their donations all in a very tight timeline. With the guidance of our client, we pursued an angle that focused on another historic building that was torn down to the community’s disappointment. Using our research-minded instincts, we searched for blogs and social media content for quotes from the community that demonstrated that disappointment.
As you can see in the final video below, we found some powerful comments on a Facebook post about the now perished La Veta Hotel that helped us provoke the emotion of disappointment. Once again, our sociological perspectives helped us make the connection between two seemingly separate things with a similar story and, hopefully, dissimilar fate.
Blogs
Blogs have also been a part of our work with HCPC. One of those blogs was a Q and A with Alonzo Hartman. Of course Alonzo Hartman has been dead for a long time, but he wrote an autobiography in the first person. Anywhere in the autobiography where Hartman talked about the home he built, we were able to formulate a question in such a way that it appeared he was answering our interview questions. It was a fun activity where we got to use a bit of our sociological imagination and it served our purpose. The purpose of the blog was to humanize Hartman and tell his story (and thus the story of the castle) in such a way that was relatable to people living today.
Another blog we wrote for this project was called The Story of How Sam Hartman Lost his Leg. For this blog we pulled some old news clippings to help tell the story of how Alonzo Hartman’s brother Sam lost his leg. It is really an incredible story, so please go read it for yourself. It tells a story of a gritty rancher in Western Colorado. Gritty ranchers still live across Western Colorado, so by telling Sam Hartman’s story, we were looking to add some historic context to how people live today, which required igniting our sociological imagination. Once again, we wanted people to relate to the Hartmans and what they went through.
One other blog we have written as a result of the Hartman Castle Preservation project is called, Did Alonzo Hartman meet Alferd Packer at Los Pinos? In this blog, we were not necessarily trying to make Hartman’s experience relatable, but rather telling a story we thought people would find interesting for another reason. The cannibal Packer is quite famous in Colorado, and by following the threads of history, we believe Alonzo Hartman may have been a part of that story. No, Hartman did not eat people, but it is an interesting story nonetheless and potentially connects Hartman Castle to a well-known story to people across the state.
Applied Sociology and the Hartman Castle Project
From the very beginning, we have understood the importance of historical context in the process of preservation. We started with the understanding that for a grassroots preservation project to be successful, there needed to be enough people that felt a connection to the property. So we started preaching early on the importance of placemaking in all of the media and social media campaigns.
HCPC plans on using the restored castle as a place for community events. For this reason the board of directors has spent a lot of effort connecting with local businesses and organizations. From the local university to Cattlemen’s Days, the largest local event in the area, these connections serve as a great foundation for not only current fundraising efforts but also the sustainability of the project once it is complete.
