When it was built, it served as a dormitory for unmarried male workers, primarily miners, at the Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I) company's coal mines and coking ovens nearby.

It was part of the company town, with modest cottages for the miners and their families as well as a school, recreation center, firehouse and other public buildings, that CF&I president John Cleveland Osgood, had spent lavishly to create along with his nearby estate.

Redstone Boulevard continues south, unpaved, along the east bank of the Crystal for over a mile, to Osgood Castle.

It is a two-and-half–story wood-frame building on a sandstone foundation sided in stucco and wood shingle, with half-timber on the clipped gable ends.

[3] On the front facade, both stories have a similar treatment, with a wooden balustrade running continuously around, allowing access to the rooms.

The upper section of the clock tower flares outward slightly, and it is topped by a pyramidal roof with overhanging eaves pierced by small centrally-located gables on each side.

[6] In the 1880s, John Cleveland Osgood, a Brooklyn native who had worked his way west, did surveys for the state of Colorado and found many areas with quality coal.

Larger cottages with electricity and running water were built for the more senior miners and managers, and Osgood's estate south of town was the largest.

[3] Such luxuries, unheard of even for management in most mountain mining camps, earned Redstone the nickname of "Ruby of the Rockies".

At their club elsewhere in the village, the newspaper reported, compromises minimized the negative effects of drinking and gambling, two longstanding sources of social problems in remote mining communities, without the difficulties created by the attempt to enforce total bans on them.

The miners were allowed to purchase alcoholic beverages only for personal consumption, thus preventing the public drunkenness that often ensued when groups of drinkers treated each other to rounds.

[8] Due to financial problems resulting from labor stoppages at its other facilities in Colorado, Osgood lost control of CF&I to representatives of the Rockefeller and Gould families in 1903.

He was less able to control the direction of Redstone, and although he started the competing Victor-American Fuel Company he spent more time back East.

In the early 1940s many of the other larger buildings of Redstone, such as its school, firehouse and its two lodges, were dismantled for scrap metal needed to fight World War II.

The inn has wireless Internet available throughout the hotel, complemented by a business center located on the main floor in the library.

[18] In addition to the location, travel writers staying at the Redstone have complimented its period furniture and interior decoration, calling it "striking.

"[4] "I love old Arts and Crafts-style lodges in remote locations", says Nicholas Trotter in Colorado & The Rockies For Dummies, "and the Redstone Inn may be my favorite anywhere."