A Kingfield Mansion Designed by Famous Inventors

Kingfield’s enterprising Stanley twins designed one of the mountain town’s most beautiful homes.

Inn on Winter's Hill, Kin
Photo by Julie Senk
By Julie Senk
From the May/June 2020 issue of Maine Homes by Down East

Kingfield-born twins Freelan O. and Francis Edgar Stanley are best remembered for developing a line of wooden steam-powered cars, known as Stanley Steamers, in the 1890s. The inventors were also architects, makers of concert-quality violins, and entrepreneurs, and their diverse interests sometimes overlapped. 

Take the mansion that Freelan, with Francis’s help, designed for their friend Amos G. Winter, a prominent Kingfield grain merchant (and father of Amos G. Winter Jr., who cut the first trails that would become Sugarloaf ski resort). Built on Winter’s Hill at the turn of the 20th century, the Colonial Revival has a hipped roof, an Ionic-columned portico centered between curved bays trimmed with pilasters, and a formal interior with many elegant details. The Stanleys also outfitted the house with an innovative steam-powered heating system that’s said to have incorporated a railroad-engine boiler. 

Generations of Winters lived in the house, which they called Hillholm. In the 1950s, a doctor used it for his clinic. Since the late ’70s, it has functioned as a hotel and restaurant, the most recent being the Inn on Winter’s Hill.

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