William Durant built the first Great Camp which was the model for others that sprung up in the Adirondack Mountains and provided summer escapes for wealthy industrialists from New York. As his ideas evolved, he built several more between 1876 and 1901. He based his plans on the great estates of England and Europe with their outbuildings, bridges, and other decorative elements adapted to the local natural materials such as wood, bark, twigs, rocks and stone. The design was rustic, and included a main lodge for socializing as well as outbuildings serving as cabins for guests, dining room and boathouse, with an ice house and blacksmith shop, among others. Balsamere is a novel about a fictional Great Camp, inherited by Laura Skillman, a descendent of the family that built the camp, after it had fallen into disrepair. As Laura struggles to revive the camp, the story moves from the privileged lives of her relatives at the time of the Great Camps, through the stock market crash that depleted the family fortunes, to the present when the history of Balsamere and its long buried secrets are revealed.