Author Description

A stranger in a buckboard appeared at Edward Saxton's door in 1885 and offered to buy his farm overlooking Lake Champlain. The farmer gave him an option and later sold. One of the largest houses in Vermont soon squatted in Saxton's apple orchard, only to be displaced within a decade by the biggest house in the state, a Y-shaped mansion of one hundred rooms manned by thirty servants and overseeing a 4000-acre agricultural estate.