In 1903 Freeland Oscar Stanley, the Newton, Massachusetts inventor who co-founded the Stanley Motor Carriage Company with his twin brother to build steam powered cars, was struck by a severe return of tuberculosis. Following Dr. Sherman Grant Bonney’s climatic cure of dry air, sunlight, and heavy meals, he and his wife Flora went to Denver and then to Estes Park, Colorado, where his health returned in a single summer. A teetotaler who did not smoke but loved billiards, he soon grew bored, and in 1908 he bought 15,000 acres assembled by the fourth Earl of Dunraven, who had used proxies to bend the Homestead Act into a private hunting preserve.

Locals hated Dunraven so much that 180 of them signed a buckskin petition asking Stanley not to name his hotel after him. The Stanley, built from 1907 to 1910 in Colonial and Georgian Revival style with yellow ochre paint, followed Bonney’s textbook: southern exposure, Palladian windows for cross breezes, and wide porches for fresh air breathing. Stanley built the Fall River hydro plant, bringing electricity to Estes Park for the first time, and carried guests up in steam mountain wagons. He helped bring about Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915 and lived to 91. Then in 1974 Stephen King stayed in room 217, had a nightmare, and conceived The Shining.

• The June 1911 acetylene gas explosion that blew maid Elizabeth Wilson through the floor
• The 1909 concert hall Stanley built as a gift for Flora
• Stanley admitting the hotel cost him more each summer than it earned
• Buying the hotel back out of foreclosure in 1929 before selling it again in 1930
• The 1997 miniseries filmed on site and the hedge maze added in 2015 for a film never shot there