Most people from Estes Park only know Flora Stanley as the wife of Freelan Oscar Stanley, the man credited with establishing the Stanley Hotel, inventing the Stanley Steamer with his brother F.E. Stanley, and building the Stanley House, “Rockside.”
However, Flora Jane Record Tileston Stanley’s life, accomplishments, and contributions have been missing…until now.
Thanks to local author Nancy Pickering Thomas, Flora Stanley has recently become a vivid character in the story of F.O.’s brilliant life and in the history of Estes Park because of Thomas’s book, “A Most Peculiar Lady: The Life and Legacy of Flora J.R.T. Stanley of Newton, MA and Estes Park, CO,” which was published just last month.
Thomas is an Estes resident, an 86-year-old retired professor from Emporia State University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Management. She earned a doctorate from Rutgers University and a master’s degree from Northwest Missouri State.
I met with her a week ago to find out how and why she chose Flora as the subject of her book. She explained how her interest was piqued while working as a docent at the Stanley Home Museum, formerly “Rockside.”
As a docent at the museum, Thomas often could not answer visitors’ questions about Flora and wanted to know more about this woman who was a part of the Stanley legacy through her 63-year marriage to Freel, as Flora called F.O.
Flora was mostly assumed to be along for the ride in F.O.’s projects and adventures, but according to Thomas, that is definitely not how she lived her life.
“In everything (F.O.) did, she had a part. In every way, they were partners,” says Thomas.
One amazing example of Flora’s involvement took place on a Sunday afternoon in 1897, when she and F.O. walked over to their steamer car factory in Newton, Mass., to figure out a problem with the new “steam carriage.” Together they dismantled the automobile and then put it back together, according to John Allen, a mechanic at the factory at the time. Because of Flora’s “full participation” in that project, Allen described Flora as “a most peculiar woman.”
Thomas writes, “The very notion that an upper-class lady in 19th-century suburban Boston would have the inclination, let alone the skills, to involve herself in such a project was indeed peculiar — peculiar and unique.”
Flora’s resume includes working as a teacher and assistant principal at schools in Maine, where she met and married F.O. After marriage, she was very involved in his various endeavors, including the invention of the dry plate for photography, the Stanley steam auto, and the Stanley Hotel. Thomas’s book explains how she significantly assisted F.O. with the dry plate production process.
One promising lead Thomas discovered early in her research was the existence of a few of Flora’s diaries in the Stanley Museum of Kingfield, Maine. She traveled there and read the diaries, but “they were very disappointing,” she says.
The diaries had about three blank lines for each day’s entry, not room to write much, Thomas explains. Almost every entry began with a weather report, then two to three sentences about what she did, maybe mentioning a person she was with that day or a venue she visited for a play, musical concert, or other show.
“Where is Flora in that?” Thomas asks.
Thomas’s work then became finding more specific information about those people and their relationships to Flora, Freel, and their lives.
Another surprising feat that Flora accomplished with F.O. was making automotive history by ascending Mt. Washington in an automobile. At 6,288 feet, it is the highest peak in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.
The route was “a narrow, rock-strewn, and deeply eroded path” used by horse-drawn carriages, Thomas writes. Flora had hiked Mt. Washington, plus, she knew a great deal about how the steam car worked, so she was a smart choice for F.O.’s partner on this climb.
Flora wrote an essay titled “An Account of the First Ascent of Mt. Washington in an Automobile, August 1889.”
The drive was scary, to say the least, according to Flora’s essay, with “a steepness so excessive that as we looked ahead we felt a sickening anxiety.”
Read Thomas’s book to experience the full adventure on Mt. Washington and see how Flora finds herself “alone amid a waste of rent and jagged rocks” before she ultimately saves the day.
Thomas also used The Boston Globe and prominent newspapers in Lewiston, Maine; Newton, Mass.; and Denver, Boulder, and Estes Park, Colo. to get facts about Flora’s participation in society.
Much has been written about F.O.’s diagnosis and struggle with tuberculosis. Flora’s vital role in treating his TB is revealed in Thomas’s book.
In February 1903, at age 54, F.O. was 5’10” and 118 pounds. His condition was listed as “grave,” and he was bedridden. The day after that prognosis, Flora started planning for their move to Colorado, which was a curative environment for TB patients, according to the doctor. Within a week, she and her critically ill husband were ready for their journey west.
Thomas discovered that Flora had taken cooking lessons from the legendary Fanny Farmer to learn about nutrition and specific dietary recommendations for particular maladies, including tuberculosis.
Armed with that information, she was “determined to rescue her husband from the grasp of a usually fatal disease,” Thomas writes, “and her recently acquired knowledge of F.O.’s dietary needs was to become a major factor in his eventual recovery.”
As for her own health, Flora suffered from a number of chronic illnesses, but even in Thomas’s extensive research, she was unable to get details. Thomas suspects “female problems,” which would not have been made public. Perhaps that is why the Stanleys never had children, Thomas speculates.
Thomas took doctors’ names from Flora’s diary entries and did research to determine their specialties and gain some insight into Flora’s sicknesses, but she was unsuccessful. “I tracked down every clue I could,” she explains.
The woman Thomas reveals in her book does not match the narratives often told about Flora. And the statue of Flora installed at the Estes Park Women’s Monument of 12 influential women in the town’s history is also misleading. It is a likeness of Flora dressed like a gypsy with a crystal ball in front of her.
Thomas says, “It leaves the impression that Flora was a silly person who believed in magic as opposed to the sophisticated and capable woman she actually was.”
The paragraph about Flora at the monument notes Flora’s philanthropic work, pointing out that she ran “a fortune-telling booth to raise money for the Women’s Club.” This credit is laughable to Thomas, who says Flora would have been mortified to read that “fact” as part of her legacy in the monument’s very short bio, “but she would also have laughed about it.”
The truth of Flora’s fortune-telling experience, uncovered by Thomas, is that for a women’s club fundraiser one summer, she had fun running a goofy fortune-telling booth, which is evidence of her “good humor and sense of fun that were hallmarks of her personality.” She was not a fortune-teller. And the monument does not adequately credit Flora for her many accomplishments.
Thomas’ book shows Flora as an independent woman. She regularly hooked up the horse-drawn carriage by herself and went out alone. Later, in Estes Park, she drove the Stanley Steamer around the mountains to show visitors the sights.
“F.O. was a 20th-century guy, and he wanted her to be everything she wanted to be,” says Thomas.
“These two encouraged one another, supported one another. It was a wonderful marriage of two incredible people, because they had a rare camaraderie and partnership. He was crazy about her.”
In some ways, the book is Flora and F.O.’s love story. Flora was still writing Valentines to him in her 80s. When she lost her sight late in life, F.O. asked the owners of the Stanley Hotel not to move the furniture so that Flora could still navigate the lobby.
There are stories of the two of them sitting on the front porch of the Stanley Hotel while he describes the view to her, reminding her of the beauty of the mountains and sunsets.
“She saves him; he saves her,” Thomas says.
About the book, Thomas says, “With a project like this, I am not sure one is ever finished — there are always ‘holes’ in the story and loose ends — but there has to be a stopping point. I have come to a stopping place, and I am glad that we now know a great deal more about Flora.”
Thomas signed copies of her book and presented about Flora on Oct. 18 at a sold-out event hosted at the Stanley Home Museum. Copies of the book are available for purchase at the museum and at Macdonald Book Shop in Estes Park.
In 2014, Thomas wrote a cookbook and social history titled “A Slice of History and a Piece of Pie: Recipes and Remembrances” for an Estes Park Museum fundraiser. The stories behind the recipes are what still make it interesting 11 years later, according to reviewers on Amazon.com.