Photo: Chris Light / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Estes Park owes much of its shape to a man who arrived in 1903 expecting to die. Freelan Oscar Stanley, an inventor from Maine, had tuberculosis, and his doctors recommended mountain air. He recovered, lived another 37 years and spent many of them building a resort town at the edge of what would become Rocky Mountain National Park.
The inventor
F.O. Stanley was born on June 1, 1849, in Kingfield, Maine, one of identical twins. With his brother, Francis Edgar Stanley, he founded a company that made photographic dry plates, a business they sold to Eastman Kodak in 1904. The brothers then turned to automobiles. Their Stanley Motor Carriage Company built the Stanley Steamer, a steam-powered car that was among the fastest of its day; a Stanley set a land speed record in 1906.
To the mountains
Stanley first came to Estes Park in 1903 and soon decided to stay, at least for summers. He drove one of his steam cars up the rough road from Lyons and later ran Stanley Mountain Wagons, steam-powered passenger vehicles that carried visitors from the railroad towns on the plains up to Estes Park.
The hotel
The Stanley Hotel opened in 1909 on a hill overlooking the town. It was built as a summer resort for wealthy visitors, with electricity, telephones and running water at a time when those were rare in the mountains. To supply power, Stanley built a hydroelectric plant on Fall River. The hotel’s white Georgian Revival buildings remain the town’s best-known landmark.
The hotel found a second kind of fame in 1974, when the author Stephen King stayed there near the end of the season. The visit helped inspire his novel The Shining, published in 1977, and the hotel now offers tours that draw on that story as well as its own history.
Building a town
Stanley invested in roads, the town’s water and power systems, and he donated land for public use. He supported the campaign, led by the naturalist Enos Mills and others, that ended in 1915 with the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park. He died on October 2, 1940.
Visiting
The Stanley Hotel and its museum are open year-round, and the Estes Park Museum covers the town’s broader history. For another early figure of the region, see our profile of Nellie Tayloe Ross.
Sources
- Estes Park Museum, Town of Estes Park.
- Stanley Museum, Kingfield, Maine.
- National Park Service, Rocky Mountain National Park history.
- National Register of Historic Places, Stanley Hotel District.
