The Great Camp Era
The Adirondack Great Camps are grand and fanciful log mansions, built by Gilded Age magnates along the rugged lakeshores of upstate New York. It was a time when cities were expanding and the natural world seemed too far away. The foremost families of the era — Vanderbilts and Astors, Guggenheims and Rockefellers — needed an escape and suddenly found they had a yearning for wooded retreats of great but rustic comfort.
Using native timber, Adirondack granite hauled by dray horse from the fields, stripped twigs and round stones pulled from the rushing rivers, they created pastoral estates of astounding beauty and charm, places where nature could be encountered in its ideal form. These Great Camps embodied the romantic, 19th century notion of "roughing it " in the highest of luxury — a dream that continues to this day to call the wealthy and adventurous to the Adirondacks. Some Great Camps were lavish, some simple — but none expressed better the collage of mountain charm than William Avery Rockefeller II's creation — "The Point" (originally known as Camp Wonundra).