The Vanderbilts
And the Story of Their Fortune
By W. A. Croffutt, 1886
310 Pages, Illustrated, Searchable
- Bonus -
Biltmore House
Published 1920
32 pages, Illustrated, Searchable
- Bonus -
Biltmore House Photogravures
Published 1900
19 pages, Illustrated
- Bonus -
Biltmore Nursery
Published 1907
194 pages, Illustrated, Searchable
- Bonus -
Forest Protection
Guide to Lectures Delivered at
Biltmore Forest School
By Carl Alwyn Schwenke, 1909
172 pages, Searchable
- Bonus -
Forest Management
Forest Working Plans
Guide to Lectures Delivered at
Biltmore Forest School
By Carl Alwyn Schwenke, 1907
42 pages, Searchable
- Bonus -
Forest Finance
Guide to Lectures Delivered at
Biltmore Forest School
By Carl Alwyn Schwenke, 1909
52 pages, Searchable
- Bonus -
Biltmore Forest
An Account of Its Treatment and
Results of the First Year's Work
By Gifford Pinchot, 1893
47 pages, Illustrated
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Biltmore
Estate is a large private estate and tourist attraction in Asheville, North
Carolina. Biltmore House, the main house on the estate, is a
Châteauesque-styled mansion built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between
1889 and 1895 and is the largest privately owned house in the United States, at
178,926 square feet and featuring 250 rooms. Still owned by one of Vanderbilt's
descendants, it stands today as one of the most prominent remaining examples of
the Gilded Age, and of significant gardens in the jardin à la française and
English Landscape garden styles in the United States.
George Vanderbilt's
idea was to replicate the working estates of Europe. He commissioned prominent
New York architect Richard Morris Hunt, who had previously designed houses for
various Vanderbilt family members, to design the house in the Châteauesque
style, using several Loire Valley French Renaissance architecture chateaux,
including the Chateau de Blois, as models. The estate included its own village,
today named Biltmore Village, and a church, today known as the Cathedral of All
Souls.
Vanderbilt
went on extensive buying-trips overseas as construction on the house was in
progress. He returned to North Carolina with thousands of furnishings for his
newly built home. These included furniture, tapestries, hundreds of carpets,
prints, linens, and decorative objects, all dating between the 1400s and the
late 1800s, and all coming from various eastern and western countries and
continents around the world. Among the few American-made items were the more
practical oak drop-front desk, rocking chairs, a walnut grand piano, bronze
candlesticks and a wicker wastebasket.
In an attempt
to bolster the estate's financial situation during the Depression, Vanderbilt's
only child, Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt, and her husband, John Amherst
Cecil, opened Biltmore House to the public in March 1930. Family members
continued to live there until 1956, when it was permanently opened to the
public as a house museum. Visitors can view the 70,000-gallon indoor swimming
pool, bowling alley, early 20th century exercise equipment, two-story library,
and other rooms filled with artworks, furniture and 19th-century novelties such
as elevators, forced-air heating, centrally controlled clocks, fire alarms and
an intercom system. The estate remains a major tourist attraction in Western
North Carolina and has almost 1 million visitors each year.
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