A $1.1 million property in western Maine has more than 44 acres with stunning views of Mount Washington and a history stretching back to the 1880s.
The family that owns the Minot house has a history almost as rich. It was the childhood home of Tom Fremont-Smith and his sister, Heather Stephens, whose parents owned an apple orchard in neighboring Auburn and found the farmhouse in the 1960s while seeking more apple property.
The home they found was in rough condition and only used seasonally by its owners, the Harris family, who had the vast property since it was built in the 1880s. The Fremont-Smiths bought and completely renovated the place from its roof to its basement in the late 1960s, transforming it into a stately, year-round home.
“It’s all over engineered,” Tom Fremont-Smith said. “It was just really, really, really well built by my folks.”
The home, which has more than 4,000 square feet of space, looks completely fresh inside. Tom Fremont-Smith’s wife, Leandra, is an interior designer and blended the home’s original woodwork and features, including fireplaces, with modern furnishings.
“She did a very good job keeping some of that original charm and the feel of an older home, but [modernized] a little bit,” the home’s listing agent, Amanda Vigue, said.
The Fremont-Smiths ended up selling the property to another family. Their kids got a chance to relive their bucolic western Maine childhoods in 2010 when those new owners offered to sell it back to them.
Tom Fremont-Smith jumped at the chance. He lives in Yarmouth but frequently works in Western Maine as one of the owners of Winterstick, a snowboard company based in the Sugarloaf area. Fremont-Smith took over ownership of that company in 2017, alongside Seth Wescott, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in snowboard cross who grew up in Farmington.
Fremont-Smith and Stephens took ownership of the four-bedroom, four-bathroom home and freshened it up, rehabbing the bathrooms and decorating it. The family had plans to use the main house as a short-term rental and its large barn as a wedding venue.
They rented the house out for a couple of years, but the COVID-19 pandemic stalled their progress on the wedding barn, Tom Fremont-Smith said.
Neither Tom nor his sister is able to maintain the property now. He’s busy with his business and his sister lives in Massachusetts, he said. Reluctantly, they’ve put it on the market.
“In today’s dollars, you couldn’t buy 45 acres, build that house, that barn, for under [$5 million],” Tom Fremont-Smith said. “It’s just a lovely, lovely, lovely piece of property. My sister and I are very attached to it.”
Listing agent Vigue, a broker with Waypoint Brokers Collective, noted that while the location is rural, it’s less than 20 minutes from Auburn. The home has been listed for a few months, and interested buyers have been looking at the place as both a seasonal and a full-time residence.
Vigue thinks it could still make a great wedding venue.
“It’s a beautiful home,” she said. “The views are spectacular.”
Correction: There are two corrections in this story. Heather Stephens’ name was misspelled, and the brother and sister are selling the home for more than they purchased it for.
