Lora Josephine Knight (1 May 1864 – 26 June 1945) was an American philanthropist from California who was at one time one of the wealthiest women in America according to newspaper reports.
She was a major promoter and financial backer of Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis; and donated to a number of other causes and funded various building projects including her own summer retreat Vikingsholm, for which she is most known.
[1] He won a gold medal in the 1904 Summer Olympics as part of American golf team, and was known for his lavish parties, but died at 25 in 1910 after a night in "Chicago's most famous and expensive house of prostitution," which made national news and led to a citywide crackdown on brothels and morphine abuse in Chicago.
[5] In 1924, the Knights hired Myron Hunt to build a home they named Cima del Mundo in Santa Barbara, California on the Montecito hillside.
[4] Knight sold her Wychwood home to San Francisco businessman Robert Stanley Dollar Sr.[1] In the summer of summer of 1929, Knight built Vikingsholm, the house she is most known for, buying the 240 acres of land in Emerald Bay in Lake Tahoe from William Henry Armstrong, who she knew through her church, for $250,000.