There are basically two reasons to visit this part of North Carolina. One is to hike around Great Smoky National Park. And the other is to see Biltmore, the estate of George Washington Vanderbilt, the largest private home in the United States. Biltmore is one of the grandest monuments of what Mark Twain called “The Gilded Age.” Twain’s phrase was not a panegyric to his era. Twain felt that there was not only something tasteless about the displays of wealth in the late nineteenth century but that it was false and inauthentic at best and profoundly corrupt at worst. And some part of all of that can be seen at Biltmore.
As was typical for the homes of the wealthy during this time, it was built to look like one of ancestral residences of European nobility. Using the architectural vocabulary of the past was not simply a lack of imagination on the part of nineteenth century builders. It was also a ploy to make the wealth of the owners more legitimate. And in the case of the Vanderbilts, who had made their fortune through ruthlessly undercutting competitors in ferry and steamship operations before establishing a near monopoly on railroads in the mid-Atlantic states, the fantasy of legitimate wealth was particularly important.
The house was built by George Washington Vanderbilt II, the youngest son of William Vanderbilt, the heir to the railroad fortune. George was one of those classic “sickly" Victorian children. He had a lifetime of various pulmonary ailments, and doctors were certain that the pure air of the mountains, as opposed to the fetid vapors of the city, could cure tuberculosis and other ailments. He looks not only unhealthy but vaguely evil in John Singer Sargent’s portrait.
Vanderbilt and his mother came to Asheville in the winter of 1888. He was 26 and had inherited a little over 10 million dollars after the deaths of his grandfather and his father. The young Vanderbilt had no interest in the transportation empires his forefathers had created. Rather, he decided that with his fortune, quite a large one by the standards of the time, he could transform himself into a European aristocrat. Using a variety of agents and concealed identities, he bought up 144 square miles of forest and farm land just south and west of Asheville. Vanderbilt was certain that he could make such a grand mass of land pay for the upkeep of a great manor house. It never did.
But the great manor house was built, the biggest private home ever constructed before or after in the United States. Vanderbilt hired William Morris Hunt, the celebrated New York architect to design the home. Vanderbilt and Hunt traveled across Europe looking for examples, and finally settled on a design drawing principally from the Chateau de Chambord in the Loire Valley. But in place of François I’s circular towers, conical roofs, and Renaissance details, Hunt made the whole thing vaguely Gothic. Biltmore is unmistakably nineteenth-century architecture.
For the grounds and the design of his agricultural schemes, Vanderbilt chose the aged Frederick Law Olmstead, famed for his work creating New York’s Central Park. Law recognized the fact that most of the land had minimal agricultural value, and convinced Vanderbilt that reforesting the area for commercial logging was the best use of this massive amount of acreage. Law also decided to create that he would create formal gardens in the French and Italian style close to the house, a wilder landscaped garden in the style of Capability Brown further out, and then allow this to merge with the forest beyond.
Some of the acreage not far from the house, near the French Broad River, would be used for fruit, vegetable, and dairy farms.
The first floor rooms are predictably grand. The “winter garden” would have been one of the first things that visitors to the house would have seen.
The dining room seats a couple dozen people comfortably. The enormous room is complete with a two manual E. M. Skinner pipe organ.
The “breakfast room” was nearly as impressive. Remember this was for informal morning dining.
Vanderbilt was particularly proud of his library of 20,000 volumes. He regarded himself as a intellectual and hosted luminaries such as Henry James and Edith Wharton.
John liked this bas relief and thought it should be on the door of my new attic office when it is finished later this year.
John also liked the loggia with its panoramic views of the Mount Pisgah and the Smoky Mountains.
We passed on the winery tour and decided to return to the hotel. In the evening we managed to get a table at Curate (that’s KOOH rah tay, as in “take care of yourself” in Spanish), Asheville’s most celebrated restaurant.
