Martin A. Brown grew up in Whitingham, but made his fortune in Wilmington village, where he rose rapidly from clerking to leading the Deerfield River Company, the Wilmington Grain and Lumber Company, the North River Manufacturing Company, and the Hoosac Tunnel and Wilmington Railroad. As his lumber and wood empire expanded, Brown kept Wilmington as his summer home, establishing Beaver Meadow Farm on six hundred acres of prime land east of the village. Here atop a rise, facing west, he commissioned a Colonial Revival house. The wood-frame, two-story house consists of a wide gabled front with twin pedimented side pavilions with two-story porches. A servants' wing projects diagonally from the rear of the north pavilion, along with a more recent extension and another pavilion. Fourteen fireplaces serve the bedrooms and public rooms, and there is an indoor bowling alley in the wing. A nine-hole golf course is on the grounds. On the south side of what is now VT 9, Brown built a modern, gambrel-roofed ground-stable barn with ells for his Jersey herd and Morgan horses. A large fragment of this 1914 structure was incorporated into the recent rebuilding of the barn. This, one of the last great gentlemen's farms in Vermont, is now open as an inn.