The Adirondack Great Camps

Scattered through these mountains are some of the most distinctive homes ever built in America, the Adirondack Great Camps. In the Gilded Age of the late eighteen hundreds, wealthy families like the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers wanted wilderness retreats that felt rustic yet spared no luxury. The man who defined the style was William West Durant, who beginning in eighteen seventy seven built Camp Pine Knot on Raquette Lake, the first of the Great Camps.

Durant's genius was to break a home into a cluster of connected buildings, clad in bark and native stone, framed with local timber, so that the camp seemed to grow right out of the rocky shoreline. Yet inside these woodsy lodges the camps gained comforts such as running water, electric lights, and modern plumbing. His masterpiece, Great Camp Sagamore, built in the eighteen nineties and later owned by the Vanderbilt family, even had its own hydroelectric plant and an outdoor bowling alley.

One of the finest surviving examples in the region is Great Camp Santanoni, near Newcomb, a National Historic Landmark you can reach by a several mile walk or wagon ride into the woods. The Great Camp look, all peeled logs, twig railings, and stone fireplaces, became known simply as Adirondack style, and it still shapes how mountain lodges across the country are built today.