Biltmore House, Asheville N.C.

Biltmore House,  Asheville N.C.

Potential Market for Elephants- Only a zoo enclosure would allow an elephant to live in this area. 

Date of My Visit-11/28/2015

History - Outside Ashville, North Carolina is Biltmore House one of the last and finest examples of what was called the Gilded Era, a time when the wealthy competed to live the most extravagant lifestyle and many people approved of them as signs of America’s industriousness.   At 250 rooms it still holds the title of the largest private residence in America.

Its origins go back to about 1800 when Cornelius Vanderbilt went to work on his father’s ferry in

Vanderbelt's Steamer Hendrick Hudson

New York Harbor. He shortly purchased a cargo vessel and began a life such as legends are made of.  His career covered the period when railroads replaced canals and steamships replaced sailing vessels for business and he almost always chose the right move.

Most historians agree Cornelius was among the ten richest men in American history at his death.  We know the son he chose to take charge of the family business, William H. Vanderbilt, inherited $95 million, which included the stocks giving him control of the family business.    

William H. Vanderbilt’s youngest son George Washington Vanderbilt II inherited a million in cash on his grandfather’s death, then another five million on his father's, as well as the income on a five million dollar trust fund.  By all reports he had no interest in business or his brother’s mansion building sprees in New York and Long Island.

However in 1888 twenty-six-year-old George and his mother went to the mountains of North Carolina to get away from the New York winter. George was captivated by the magnificent vistas near Asheville, and decided he would build there beginning construction in 1889. 

The current view from the main balcony.

First young Vanderbilt contacted two world famous experts, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Richard Morris Hunt.   Olmsted was famous for public parks in Boston, Chicago, and Buffalo and Central Park in New York.  Richard Morris Hunt, known for the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard and The New York Tribune building, had become George’s friend while working on the Vanderbilt family mausoleum on Staten Island.

Olmsted and Hunt both saw this as a chance with nearly unlimited funding to create their masterpieces.  Vanderbilt had purchased 228 square miles to insure privacy.  Olmsted found most of the land unsuitable for gardens and suggested ornamental gardens and ponds be installed in a few acres around the Mansion.  The estate could be used for experimental farms to support a village and the forest replanted for commercial logging. 

Vanderbilt agreed and then went to work with Hunt.  They had decided to recreate a French château, 

Chateau Chambord

borrowing from Chambord in the Loire Valley. The name Biltmore came from the Vanderbilt’s ancestral village of De Bilt in Utrecht, Netherlands,

As three miles of railroads were built to transport in Indiana Limestone,  many local people were hired, drainage and culverts prepared, deep foundations laid and stone masons were trained to cut external decorations. 

At the same time young Vanderbilt began collecting and commissioning art work and fixtures for the château. 

The grand opening of the house was Christmas Eve 1895 when most of his immediate family arrived at his special train station and rode up the beautifully landscaped road to the almost fully furnished mansion. Even George’s big brothers were impressed with a building that took in 135,280 square feet of living space, including thirty-three bedrooms, in case his whole family descended on him. 

For guests it included a swimming pool, bowling alley, billiards, fishing and hunting. 

Empty Swiming Pool

Bowling Alley

 Commercial logging, tree sales from the Biltmore Nursery and the popular Biltmore dairy originally supported the estate, but the pig and chicken farms failed.  

George Vanderbilt was generally described as living the life of a gentleman farmer, but he continued his scholarly pursuits in his over 23,000 volume library, traveled and collected.  He brought back Napoleon’s chess set, samurai armor, and treasures from the Imperial Palace in Beijing. Later the family got motorcycles and cars.  At the same time he and his wife contributed generously in time and money to local charities, especially those that equipped young people in the poverty stricken mountains with trades.  

However after about five years even a Vanderbilt began to run out of money.  Maintenance of the estate had to be cut from $250,000 to $40,000 a year.   When he died suddenly in 1914 George Washington Vanderbilt’s personal fortune consisted of $929,740.98, which included his railroad stocks.   His only child, Cornelia, received the income from the five million dollar trust he had inherited. His wife Edith inherited the Biltmore estate and mansions in Washington D.C. and Bar Harbor, Maine, but very little to maintain them after all the bequests.

George had tried to sell 120,000 acres to the United States Forest Preservation Commission.  Within three months of her husband’s death, Edith Vanderbilt had sold 86,700 acres to the National Forest Preservation Commission for $ 433,500, five dollars an acre, $200,000 less than her asking price.   This sale raised funds for her, but also helped start a national forestry school that George had dreamed of.  Later Edith sold off additional acreage as she needed money until only a core estate of about 12,500 acres remained.

In 1924 Cornelia married John Cecil, First Secretary of the British Embassy. At their wedding at

Biltmore the groom announced he would resign his post and take over management of the estate.   He and his wife were able make the estate profitable and preserved the mansion while the residences of George W. Vanderbilt’s brothers were being torn down. 

In 1930 to help with the effects of the Great Depression on Ashville the Cecils opened the house and gardens to encourage tourists to the area.   This could be said to be the start of making the estate pay for itself through tourism.

With the failure of their marriage Cornelia left the estate forever but John Cecil maintained his residence until his death in 1954. Their eldest son George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil lived there until 1956. 

Since then Biltmore House has ceased to be a family residence and has operated as a private museum. There has been at least one family member in residence on the estate while more of the house has opened to tourists and new attractions are added to the estate.  In 1964 it was registered as a National Historical Landmark, a building officially recognized by the United States government for its outstanding historical significance.

My Visit

Like most visitors I used exit 50 from Interstate 40. One enters through a classic gate way, then purchase tickets at a welcome center.  I suggest starting one’s visit at the Biltmore house proper.  Pay close attention to the bridges and culverts on the entrance highway.                                                                                              

There are several large parking lots, with buses running regularly. Stay alert, the road was laid out to keep one from getting a clear view of the building and its mountain backdrop until one pulls up in front.

You enter at the main door a few people at a time. There is no photography, video or sketching in the Chateau.   The self-guided tour with a free booklet is good but I suggest supplementing it by renting the recorded tour.  They don’t supply earphones; so bring your own, the building is not quiet.

The ground entrance way is built around the Winter Garden a two story room with a glass dome for a roof.  There is a sampling of warm weather plants, and a fountain with a statue Boy Stealing Geese by Karl Bitter.  

The tour then continues into the Billiard Room where guests played billiards and dominoes.  There

are disguised doors to allow the single gentlemen to go directly to the bachelor wing with the smoking and gun rooms. 

Also on the first floor tour is the banquet hall a two story monster of a room bigger and fancier then I remember the banquet hall at Castle Edinburgh.   It has three fire places, seating for 38 and an organ loft.   Every year they still put up an enormous Christmas tree cut on the estate. 

The music room, with a pianoforte, was one of the rooms

unfinished until the Cecil family completed it in 1976. A multi-piece engraving by Albrecht Dürer called The Triumphal Arch that was stored and forgotten has been installed in its intended place over the fire place.  

The Tapestry Galley is modeled on such galleries in a number of palaces but at 90 feet is one of the longest known.  The gallery has a set of seven Flemish tapestries called The Triumph of the Seven Virtues, and portraits of the Vanderbilt family by John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler.

Vanderbilt’s library is the dream of any book nerd. It has two

stories of shelves, comfortable chairs and work tables.  He was fairly fluent in at least eight languages and had a hobby of translating contemporary literature into Ancient Greek, probably for practice.  Much of the collection was gathered by him personally in used book stores rather following the common practice of purchasing whole libraries.  The ceiling painting The Chariot of Aurora by Giovanni Pellegrini was purchased from the Pisani Palace in Venice.  

Upstairs the most striking rooms to me were a set of guest bedrooms whose renovation was completed in 2011.  Each is named after a special feature, the Damask room has silk damask draperies and damask-style wallpaper,  the Claude room  displays several works by Claude Lorrain, and the  focal point of the Tyrolean Room is the over mantel, constructed from an antique tile-stove called kachelöfen from the 18th century.  

The Louis XV room has views of the gardens and terraces to the east and south, and is opulently furnished in silk and velvet, in the

Louis XV style.  Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt was born in this room and she later choose to deliver her two sons there, giving it the nickname Heart of the Household.

When checking out George Washington Vanderbilt’s bed room I couldn’t move on until I found

Etching by Durer

some books, with book marks in them, on a side table.  There are other rooms open but the most interesting feature to me was every hall way and most of the other walls were covered in etchings collected by Vanderbilt on trips to Europe.

In the basement one sees maids and cooks quarters, the laundry

Laundry

with a giant hot water heater and electric laundry dryer racks, giant freezers and pantries, the pastry kitchen, the rotisserie kitchen and the main kitchen. 

Kitchen

 All the rooms for the working staff were equipped with clocks synchronized to a central unit.

If you are interested there are separate backstage and roof guided tours for additional fees that I skipped.  I recommend a good lunch at the Stable Cafe. Also in the renovated stable are a snack bar, chocolate confectionary and several kinds of souvenir shops.  The book store is well stocked but expensive.

Then a good long walk through the gardens around the house down to the conservatory.

The gardens start right outside the library with a Terrace shaded by
wisteria on a frame and a large flat long lawn for playing yard games.  The Italian Garden features sculpture and koi ponds in the summer for contemplation.  Before reaching the Conservatory one passes through the Shrub Garden designed for 500 different kinds of ornamental shrubs, the Walled Garden which in season is laid out as a formal English style garden and the Rose Garden with Heritage roses.   

Defiantly check out the Conservatory filled

with tropical plants.

For the real gardeners there is a tool and cuttings shop in the basement.   

There are several medium length trails from the Conservatory.   They are nice but during the shorter days you can drive by the Bass Pond and the Boat House were the Vanderbilt’s guests used to row and fish to reach Antler Hill Village

Be sure to stop at the village.  First I highly suggest visiting the small museum called the Biltmore Legacy with excellent exhibits and knowledgeable docents. The Barn has a rotating series of demonstrators of carpentry, farming and other stuff.  The Farm is a petting zoo.  When you bought your ticket also paid for two glasses at the wine bar from the Biltmore Winery.  I decided on dinner at Cedric’s Tavern named after Cornelia Vanderbilt’s childhood companion a St. Bernard named Cedric. 

Geek Factor:

The grounds and parts of the estate have been in a number of films

including The Clearing (2004) Hannibal (2001) Return to the Secret Garden (2000) and Patch Adams (1998).  The house appeared as the Pruitt mansion on the TV show The Pruitts of Southampton and its image was used in the video game Sid Meier’s Civilization V

Further Sources

Open House Official Blog of Biltmore House;   http://www.biltmore.com/blog/

Biltmore House Web Site   http://www.biltmore.com

Biltmore House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltmore_Estate

Vanderbilt II, Arthur, Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 2013

Rickman, Ellen Erwin, Images of America: Biltmore Estate, Arcadia Publishing, Charleston, S.C.  2005                                      ISBN 100-78351749-6

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