Community Highlights: Meet Jason Huggins of Prairie Preservation, Ltd.

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jason Huggins.

Hi Jason, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I was born and raised in Sterling, CO, a small town in the northeastern corner of the state. My mom’s family has lived in Logan County since the 1890s, so I’ve always felt very connected to the area and the landscape. Both sides of my mom’s family owned land in the Iliff and Proctor area, 15 to 30 minutes northeast of Sterling. This stretch along I-76 is called the South Platte Valley, and I always find inspiration in the open spaces surrounding the green pocket that is Sterling and the agricultural communities that dot the valley. My dad is from Long Island, so I grew up with what I call this dual sensibility from the East Coast and the Wild West.

I went to Sterling schools and graduated from Sterling High. I attended Regis University from 2012 – 2016, receiving degrees in art history and business administration. Finding a job at that time felt rough, and I remember applying to 28 jobs during the second semester of my senior year. Two called back; one of them was Regis’s admissions office. I worked there for two years, but knew I wanted something different. I’ve always loved architecture and historic preservation. Any paper I wrote for my art history courses I tried writing about architectural history. My honors thesis was about architectural propaganda at world’s fairs.

I started searching for historic preservation programs and applied, was accepted, and committed to attending CU Denver’s program in Downtown Denver. On a whim, I applied to the University of Edinburgh’s program, in Scotland, not thinking I would be accepted. I was, and I jumped on that opportunity to move to Scotland and study architectural conservation at the Edinburgh College of Art. I lived there from 2018 to 2019, and returned in 2019 to write my dissertation on the Downtown Sterling Historic District. I graduated in November 2019, with merit, ready to start my career in preservation. I registered an LLC, Prairie Preservation, Ltd., while working as an intern for Colorado Preservation, Inc. (CPI).

In March 2020, the world froze due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A month and a half later, my mom unexpectedly passed away at 58 due to complications from congestive heart failure. My boss at CPI was very gracious and kept me working as much as he could during this time. No one was hiring, and I went months without knowing what I was going to do. I finally was hired as a librarian at the Sterling Public Library, which I grew up going to, and felt some stability for the first time in almost a year. I bought a tiny cottage needing a ton of work, that came with an abandoned school house built in 1892, on three city lots in town. I adopted a cat. I felt I was making progress.

While working as a librarian, I was asked to come teach at a local elementary school. I declined because I was content in my current position. A year later, I was asked again and accepted. I taught fifth grade, and it was the most challenging year of my life, personally and professionally. By the end of the year, I was applying for another teaching position at a smaller school 15 minutes away. I was hired there for the following school year, and the summer in between, I walked the Camino de Santiago for 36 days to try to figure out more of my life. The Camino saved me in many ways; it jumpstarted a renewed focus on my spiritual, mental, and physical wellbeing that I’m still working on.

Last year was my first year teaching sixth grade at my second school. I completed an alternative teacher licensure program and now have my professional teaching license. I love teaching, but it obviously comes with its challenges no matter the school. Times are so different than when I was a student, and my students are dealing with things we could not have imagined 20 years ago. Last year was also the first year that I leaned more into developing Prairie Preservation. A former colleague from CPI, that now has her own preservation services business, asked me to help on two nominations for the National Register of Historic Places. I helped with grants before but these were the largest projects I’ve worked on so far.

We found out in March 2025, that one of the projects was added to the National Register, the Petroleum Building on the 16th Street Mall. That has been the highlight of my career in historic preservation so far. I’ve always been nervous about being pigeon-holed into one field. My time at Regis fostered this idea that in reality, you can do whatever you want with your education, experiences, talents, etc. Education is something I find extremely important. My parents’ dedication to it in my early life opened so many doors for me that I hope my students are able to experience one day. Currently, I enjoy the professional balance I have, in which I can take on projects as they come to me while having the stability of teaching.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
On paper, and how my life was portrayed on social media the last ten years, everything probably appeared to have been cruise controlled on a smooth road. My parents always wanted me to find a job that I could stick with for years. They met in college and both had stable jobs working for the government. If you looked at my resume, you’d see there’s a two-year expiration date for every job I’ve had since college. That hasn’t been a conscious effort made on my part, but sometimes I do feel self-conscious about it. That just seems to be how my life worked out each time. A dead wringer for a flighty applicant, or so I was always told.

In reality, the latter half of my twenties was anything but smooth. I graduated in 2019 with a master’s thinking all aspects of my life would catapult from that moment. After my mom’s death five months later, nothing about my life felt settled. Paired with the pandemic-induced hiring freezes, losing my mom left me feeling frozen. I tried doing everything I thought would make me feel fulfilled. I bought a fixer-upper, adopted a cat, and eventually got a dog. Those things have been nice and keep me busy. I eventually became a teacher, which is what my mom went to school for. My business has a little traction that has given me more confidence. I still struggle with imposter syndrome, in both teaching and preservation. Over the last two years, I finally feel thawed. Thawing took a lot of work that still isn’t done. I focused on my physical health and went to therapy for a year. Nothing about the last five years was how I thought it would be, but that’s okay.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I registered my business in 2019. Prairie Preservation was inspired by where I’m from, the High Plains of eastern Colorado. Kathleen Norris is the author of one of my favorite books, Dakota. I had to read it in college and fell in love with the way she described her hometown in South Dakota. She equated the landscape to the ocean, with the lights of farms and ranches in the distance looking like boats at sea during the night. She asked why the ocean is considered so dynamic and beautiful but the Great Plains are seen as static and dull. To her the rolling hills and plateaus inspired as much beauty as the ocean. My business came from this love I have for the plains and the natural prairie landscapes I drove through as a child: wide open and emblematic of the American West.

I call myself a preservation consultant because I’m still figuring out what I’m capable of in the field of historic preservation. Attending a foreign university has been a double-edged sword. I wasn’t immersed in the American system of preservation during my graduate studies. I had to teach myself a lot about how everything works here because I studied the Scottish/British/European models in grad school. Studying in Scotland does set me apart, I believe, because I had access to the oldest architectural conservation program in the United Kingdom, and studied unique topics in person, such as post-war reconstruction in Germany.

Since coming back to the United States, I’ve worked on a lot of partnerships in grant writing. I typically write building descriptions and do historical and archival research. During the summer of 2024, a former colleague contracted me to work on my first National Register nomination for a sketchy motel on East Colfax. The motel is currently being appropriately redeveloped, in my opinion, by a skilled and tasteful developer. That partnership led to another opportunity to work on a nomination for the Petroleum Building, Denver’s third skyscraper. My part of that project was nothing compared to the others on the team, but I am proud of the work and feel grateful to have had that experience. I went from writing descriptions of small buildings in Trinidad and mining towns to a 14-story high rise in a matter of months. The Petroleum Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in March 2025, and the La Vista Motel was listed in April 2025.

I’m still learning about what I am capable of through my business. I can be kind of blunt when speaking to property owners about what they want to do with a building, especially since I believe that if they actually care about a historic property, then they should be willing to do the work the right way. This might be where my Scottish education comes into play because the UK has such strict conservation guidelines for properties listed on their equivalent to the NRHP. Having experienced preservation at home and abroad, I feel I bring a unique perspective to my research and writing but also to ideas on design and materials. This has also become apparent as I’ve worked on my own home and historic structures on my property.

How do you think about luck?
Lucky has never been a word I’ve used to describe myself. Fortunate is more of the word I would use. I think luck implies chance encounters or moments, and I believe there’s more of a reason behind everything. My life has been a series of decisions I made, or was influenced to make, that feel less like luck and more like intentional living. The closest example of luck in my business is how I met my former boss at Colorado Preservation, Inc. While researching for my dissertation, I went to a State Historical Fund information session in Akron, CO. He was there and started asking me questions about what I was doing there. He told me to contact him in the fall of 2019, which I did, and was hired as his intern. He became a sort of mentor that I still talk to today. He brought me into the preservation fold in Colorado, and because of him I met my colleague I started working on projects with last summer.

Through my internship, I was fortunate to meet one of my preservation idols, Dana Crawford. Her friend that I knew through CPI asked if I would help at an event at Dana’s house. I was driving back to Colorado through New Mexico and jumped at the chance. It was days before lockdown in March 2020. Covid was becoming more of an issue, but no one was too worried yet. There I was, helping with this event in Dana Crawford’s storied Capitol Hill home. It was a dream. The highlight of the night was escorting Dana down the back stairwell to her car and handing her her cane. I was fortunate to have had that first and last chance to meet her, and feel grateful now especially after her passing earlier this year. I suppose I was “lucky” that night as well, since a couple of days later I got the call that someone at the party tested positive for Covid and luckily I didn’t fall ill.

Good luck, bad luck, whatever someone wants to call it, I just think of it as life. There are highs and lows, ebbs and flows. You can either take or pass opportunities as they are presented to you. I’ve passed on plenty I wish I would have had the confidence to take on. As I get older, I try to focus less on those moments and accept opportunities as they come to me, while maintaining a sense of gratitude for what I’ve been “lucky” enough to experience in my life, good or bad.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prairiepreservation/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prairiepreservation
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/prairie-preservation-ltd

Image Credits
Kylee Davidson