Knollwood Club - HSL Wiki

The view from Knollwood Club, 1906

The boathouse at Knollwood. The front of one of the cottages can be seen on the extreme left. Knollwood Display by Amy Catania and Mary Hotaling, Shown at History Day 2008. Click on the image to enlarge the display Four of the gable designs View from Shingle Bay. Three of the six cottages are visible.

Knollwood Club is an Adirondack Camp on Shingle Bay, Lower Saranac Lake, near the village of Saranac Lake, New York. It was designed in 1899-1900 by William L. Coulter, who had previously created a major addition to Alfred G. Vanderbilt's Sagamore Camp, and built by Branch and Callanan. The "club" consisted of a boathouse, "casino", and six identical two-and-a-half story shingle cottages, which were distinguished by unique twig work facades. Most of the camp complex still stands in largely its original condition on Shingle Bay on the Lower Lake.

The club consisted of six shingled houses with rustic embellishments, which were distinguished by unique twig work facades. The houses were nearly identical except for the log patterns in their front gable screens. The club included several other buildings for common use: a boathouse, a “casino,” where meals were served, and a number of service buildings. The principle buildings were connected by raised plank walkways with log railings with the bark left on.

In the year 1900, Seaver Asbury Miller described Knollwood: “The advantages of Camp Knollwood are unsurpassed by any camp in the Adirondacks, and especially for this arrangement of buildings, as it is in a bay facing the south, protected from high winds, and has shallow as well as deep water and is surrounded by virgin forests. The camp is on an elevation and is well drained. This place affords one of the rare opportunities offered to gentlemen coming to the Adirondacks, and especially the game park, and it is the intention of the owners of this property to stock their ponds with fish and to preserve the trees of the forest.” ¹

The camp was built for six friends: Louis Marshall; Daniel Guggenheim; George Blumenthal, who made the contract with Coulter; Elias Asiel; Max Nathan; and A.N. Stein. The choice of Lower Saranac Lake as the site was determined in part by the growing anti-semitism in America in that period. In 1877, Joseph Seligman was involved in the most publicized antisemitic incident in American history up to that point, being denied entry into the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York. William West Durant owned much of the land bordering the Saranac Lakes, and was more than willing to sell to any and all buyers. As a result, many of the Great Camps and cottages on the Saranac Lakes were built by wealthy Jewish families.

Bob Marshall, the wilderness activist, and George Marshall, the conservationist, spent the summers of their youth there, and were greatly influenced by the surroundings.

Albert Einstein was a frequent summer visitor;² he was at Knollwood on August 6, 1945 when he heard on the radio that that atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, and it was at Knollwood that he gave his first interview after the event, on August 11. ³

Sources

Kaiser, Harvey. Great Camps of the Adirondacks. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982. ISBN 0-87923-308-7.

See also

External links

Other historic properties

Comments:

1Asbury Miller, Seaver “Adirondack News and Notes,” Saranac Lake, NY, July 21, 1900.
2Historic Saranac Lake
3Taylor, Robert, America's Magic Mountain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. ISBN 0-395-37905-9