Lake Tahoe

The woman who helped pay for Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic built a stone tea house on the only island in this lake.

Lora Josephine Knight and her husband were principal backers of the Spirit of St. Louis in 1927. The following year she bought two hundred and forty acres at the head of Emerald Bay, together with Fannette Island sitting in the middle of it, for a quarter of a million dollars. The bay reminded her of a Norwegian fjord, so she hired a Swedish architect and put up a thirty eight room Scandinavian manor with sod roofs and carved dragon beams. Two hundred workers, one summer.

While that was going on she turned her attention to the island. Granite was quarried nearby, barged across, and lifted stone by stone with derricks to build a small castle of a tea house on the summit, sixteen feet square.

She spent the next fifteen summers at Vikingsholm and died there in 1945. By most accounts she hardly ever used the tea house.