Historic Georgetown, Inc., was incorporated May 4, 1970, to advance the preservation of the historic character and natural setting of Georgetown, Colorado. Georgetown is valuable to the history of our area because it is one of the few Rocky Mountain mining towns that retains its historic integrity; the town still has more than 200 nineteenth-century structures.

The national significance of Georgetown¹s history was recognized in 1966 when the Department of Interior, through the National Park Service, designated the Georgetown-Silver Plume National Historic Landmark District. The Colorado Historical Society acknowledged and increased the importance of the area by choosing the valley between Georgetown and Silver Plume as the location of the State of Colorado¹s Georgetown Loop Historic Mining and Railroad Park, with the additional development and maintenance of the Lebanon Silver Mine and Georgetown Loop Railroad.

Over the last 33 years, Historic Georgetown, Inc. has successfully promoted town-wide preservation and undertaken the restoration of some of the town¹s landmark structures. HGI sponsors educational and publication programs, conducts numerous special events, maintains a small public park and approximately 1,000 acres of open lands (for public recreational use and protection of the natural setting of Georgetown), and, most notably, is engaged in a unique Five-Part Residential Interpretive Program.

This most unusual and ambitious effort in small-town preservation seeks to preserve specific dwellings in order to provide a permanent and well-rounded record of the architecture and residential life of the 19th-century mining West. This plan contrasts with the traditional preservation approach that generally consists of restoring a single structure that possesses outstanding architectural and/or historical significance; often, it is one that exemplifies not the home of a typical mining-town resident, but rather that of the more prosperous or well-known resident.

The HGI plan goes far beyond the traditional approach in that it consists of not one but a series of structures that will preserve the small as well as the large, the typical as well as the unusual, and the seemingly unimportant as well as the obviously important. These five structures are the homes of:

• a wealthy mine owner and entrepreneur -
  Hamill House
• a mine manager and professional - Bowman/White House
• a merchant ­ Kneisel House
• a miner - Tucker Rutherford Cottage
• an early miner or prospector -
  Johnson Log Cabin

When completed, The Five-Part Residential Interpretive Program will interpret a variety of 19th-century lifestyles for the people of Colorado as well as the thousands of others who visit Georgetown annually.