Great Camps Architecture
Great Camps are compounds of buildings meant as a self-contained (often self-sustaining) seasonal retreat for a wealthy family, mimicking a tiny rural village. Great Camp architecture reached its peak around the dawn of 20th Century, as the industrial magnates of the Gilded Age were spending their fortunes on ways to escape the crowded and polluted cites of the Northeast. Each building served a separate purpose, with dining halls, libraries, game rooms, blacksmith shops, boathouses, carriage houses, barns, farms, guest quarters, servants? quarters and lounges, many connected by covered walkways for protection on rainy days.
Many Great Camps fell into disrepair as the wealthy owners passed away or lost their fortunes in the Great Depression. Some were later purchased by scout groups and other institutions that had the means to keep them in order.
Perhaps the two most important features of Durant?s Great Camps are his use of the landscape to conceal the buildings from view until you are right next to them, and his use of indigenous material (whole logs, twigs, rock and bark) to create a rustic look that matched the landscape but also provided great comfort within. It was a combination of the American log cabin and the opulent European ski chalet. The style has been widely emulated, serving as the prototype for nearly every major lodge and administrative structure built by the National Park Service, including Yellowstone Lodge in Montana.
Durant was the son of Thomas C. Durant (1820-1885), a railroad tycoon and financial manipulator who briefly gained control of the Union Pacific Railroad during the 1860s, and whose machinations resulted in the 1872 Credit Mobilier scandal. By the 1870s Thomas Durant had become the largest private landowner in the Adirondacks, and he had delegated his son to develop portions of his holdings for future sale to the moneyed elite.