Farmhouse

The Clark Farm was the largest and most prosperous farm in nineteenth-century Wells, where Theodore Clark maintained a large apple orchard and many sheep on land his family had occupied for generations, and in 1820 he renovated his home into a mansion on Farm Hill. The oldest part of the present-day house was built in 1720, and Farm Hill produced 500 pounds of wool in 1870; fourteen Clark family members gathered there for Thanksgiving dinner in 1879. In 1882, George Clement Lord purchased Farm Hill, 240 years after the land was first cultivated, and made his fashionable estate near his boyhood home in Kennebunk a valued summer gathering place for family and friends. As his descendants managed the farm, their children helped with chores, played on the beach, and befriended farm animals. During the Great Depression, the Lord family took in summer boarders who came to Maine for a relaxing getaway, enjoying tennis, golf, horseback riding, bathing in the ocean, and drives to nearby Ogunquit. After an 1890 renovation, the house had ten bedrooms and four bathrooms; it was last inhabited year-round in 1922 and last used as a summer residence in 1975.

Wells, Maine · United States