Allen Miller Fletcher had already made a fortune in banking and on the New York Stock Exchange by the time he decided to build a retirement home in his family’s ancestral town of Cavendish, Vermont, in 1905. He hired the Boston firm Fehmer and Page to design an English Cotswold-style mansion, quarrying gneiss stone on-site and shipping in California redwood, and spent five years having European craftsmen carve the elaborate interior detailing.
Fletcher spared no expense: he brought in Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design the grounds, installed Tiffany glasswork throughout, and made the house the first in Vermont fully wired for electricity, complete with nickel-plated hose connections on every floor in case of fire. Fletcher went on to serve as Vermont’s governor from 1912 to 1915. The estate operates today as a 10-room inn alongside a larger modern hotel building, with much of Fletcher’s original woodwork and lighting still intact.