Raquette Lake.

Raquette Lake is where the Adirondack Great Camp tradition was invented. William West Durant — son of the railroad financier Thomas C. Durant — built Pine Knot here in 1877 and spent the next twenty years selling it (and its successors, Sagamore and Uncas) to the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, and the Vanderbilts' cousins. The architectural vocabulary that Durant codified at Pine Knot — the rustic-bark exteriors, the twig railings, the half-timbered halls hung with snowshoes and antlers, the grand main lodge attended by separate guest cabins — became the visual idiom of every American mountain resort that followed, from the National Park Service lodges to the Yellowstone hotels. It started here, on this lake.

Great Camp Sagamore is still operating, owned by a nonprofit since the 1970s, and runs as a working learning center with overnight programs, summer courses, and Sunday tours. Pine Knot itself, though closed to the public, is intact on its peninsula. The W. W. Durant — a working twin-deck restaurant boat — runs guided meal-tours of the lake's historic shoreline from May through October, and is the easiest way for a casual visitor to see the camps without booking a multi-day program.

The permanent population is roughly a hundred. There is one general store, one church, one post office, no bank, no traffic light. The town is a Carnegie-library-and-pew-Sunday small Adirondack hamlet, with the Vanderbilt-era estates that built American luxury sitting just out of view down the shoreline. It is the most architecturally significant region in the Park, and one of the smallest.