WINTHROP – He restored his first antique when he was 10. He went on to restore well over 10,000. Stephen Wright Weston unexpectedly suffered a fatal heart attack on Feb. 4, 2022, at his Winthrop home.He was a seventh generation Mainer, born on March 22, 1951 in Caribou, Maine, to Donald and Theodora Weston. He grew up in Winterport, Maine, attended both Bangor and Brewer High Schools and initially entered the University of Maine to follow in the engineering footsteps of his father and other male family members but soon found it didn’t fit. So he headed a little south, to Winthrop, Maine, bought a small 1830s cape and began discovering what things had been and proving what they could again become.He opened the doors of his furniture restoration business when he was 20. He never ran an ad; he never hung a sign and for a long time, he didn’t list a phone number. Word of his work spread rapidly and within weeks he was, he once recalled, swamped with work. He almost immediately branched off into house restoration and through the years, disassembled and saved all, or parts of, twenty 18th and 19th century houses that would otherwise have been razed, rebuilding and restoring many of them, including the one in which he last resided. He surrounded his 1842 home with historically accurate flower gardens. His knowledge and expertise in furniture restoration and preservation, said one antique dealer who became a customer when Weston was just 22, was intrinsic, his skill, nearly unfathomable. He received calls from all over the country, routinely did work for dozens of antique dealers in Maine and other parts of New England, and did work for museums and historical societies statewide, including extensive restoration and exhibitions for the Maine State Museum and for both the private and public rooms of the Governor’s Mansion. He helped conceptualize and created the 19th century cabinet maker’s shop for the state museum’s permanent exhibit and wrote a chapter on 19th century paint methodology for the state museum book on design and color. Throughout his career, he made all his own paints and finishes. He taught a class at the American Museum of Folk Art in New York City on 19th century paint designs. And he restored premier exhibit pieces by the Herter Brothers, prominent 19th century furniture designers and decorators, for a major exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.He once routinely categorized his conservation accomplishments as merely preserving his own heritage. He was a voracious reader, referring to his extensive library and study of the 1800s as “reading the nineteenth century.” He was an accomplished birder who, after reporting the discovery of a white robin at his yard feeder at the age of 10, was invited to participate in a university birding group. He later sculpted the white robin in wood. For several years he published a Maine birding magazine. He had a lifelong passion for stamp collecting and an extensive knowledge of early glass which he meticulously collected throughout his adult life.Separate from his career as a conservator, and less well known, was his extensive work as an artist. His daily entries into several hundred notebooks contain an endless array of solved equations to facilitate the creation of his elaborate sketches, many of them now materialized in paintings, wooden sculptures and whimsical items of furniture and everyday objects. Artist Eric Hopkins, a longtime close friend, described Stephen as a “brilliant, creative genius — a true Maine Yankee Renaissance man.”In recent years he had become passionate in researching the genealogy of his maternal ancestors in the Walpole, New Hampshire area and had hoped to spend extended time there. Some of his cremated remains will be distributed there in the upcoming summer.Stephen was predeceased by his parents, by his cousin David Wright of Vermont and by his sister-in-law Judith Fitzpatrick-Weston.He is survived by his longtime partner, Terrilyn Simpson of Winthrop, her son, Quinton Moran of North Carolina and daughter, Crescent Chasteen of Massachusetts, their spouses, Amy Moran and John Chasteen and grandchildren Samuel and Tristan Moran, Hunter Ward, Jordan and Thomas Ruschak and Grayson and Rosie Chasteen. He is also survived by brothers John Weston and wife Teri of New York and Peter Weston and a sister, Anne Weston Worthley and husband Clint, all of Maine, and nephew Joel Weston and his wife, Suki and their son Bowie. He is additionally survived by close friends Nate Tuttle of Pittston, Eric Hopkins of North Haven, and the Ed and Shirley Churchill family of Augusta. Stephen was much loved and will be greatly missed.A memorial service, to be announced, will be held in the late spring.

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