Started in 1876, Pine Knot was the first camp built by William West Durant, and is often cited as the birthplace of the Adirondack Style. Located on a peninsula on Raquette Lake, he worked on it over a period of 13 years, while designing and building other camps in the area as well. William West Durant was the son of Thomas C. Durant, a railroad magnate who owned more than half a million acres in the Adirondacks, which he asked William to help develop, by making it a fashionable place for wealthy friends and associates to spend their summers. Pine Knot celebrated the natural patterns of the wood (including its pine knots), an aesthetic used by others before him, but which he took to new heights here, and on other bigger camps, purchased by the likes of J. P. Morgan, and the Vanderbilts. In 1895 Durant sold Pine Knot to Collis P. Huntington, the railroad magnate, who died there in 1900. It was largely unused over the following 50 years, until gifted to the State University of New York at Cortland, which operates it as the Huntington Memorial Outdoor Education Center. It is not open to the public.
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