Vikingsholm: The Castle at the End of the Trail

The hike down to Vikingsholm is a mile, and steep, and worth it. At the bottom, at the head of Emerald Bay, there is a building that requires a moment to take in.

It has thirty-eight rooms. The rooflines are planted with wildflowers growing in sod. The doorframes are carved with reproductions of eighth-century Norse decorative work. There is a stone Tea House on the island in the middle of the bay. The woman who built all of this paddled a canoe to the Tea House every morning to have her coffee.

Her name was Lora Knight. She was born in Chicago and inherited a fortune from her first husband's industrial holdings, which included Union Pacific Railroad, United States Steel, and the Diamond Match Company, and in nineteen twenty-eight purchased the land at the head of this bay. She commissioned a Swedish architect named Lennart Palme to design a summer home modeled on Scandinavian architecture from a thousand years before either of them were born. Construction finished in nineteen twenty-nine.

It is a remarkable piece of work. The craftsmanship is genuine, the materials were sourced carefully, and the result is something that should not exist here and absolutely does. It is also, if you want to be accurate about what you are looking at, an heiress purchasing a cultural identity she had no ancestral connection to and installing it on a lake that belonged to the Washoe people, who had been coming to Emerald Bay to fish and gather for thousands of years before the sod roof was planted.

California State Parks has owned the building since Knight's time. They maintain it beautifully. The building is a compressed summary of what the American twentieth century did with the American West: it found beauty, bought it, adorned it with borrowed mythology, and called it home. The Washoe were here before the architect's blueprints. The view has not changed.