America's Castle - Biltmore Estate

The lives of wealthy Victorian-era Americans were filled with parties, travel and leisure. One notable name associated with this Gilded Era was Vanderbilt, a family who made their fortune in the railroad industry.

In 1888, George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, visited the mountains of western North Carolina with his mother, and fell victim to the lure of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains.

Not yet married, George had a dream of building a vast country estate and he found the ideal location in Asheville, North Carolina. The area boasts breathtaking scenery and a climate that's relatively mild for a mountainous area.

With a bankroll rivaling the gross national product of a small country, George purchased 125,000 acres of pristine wilderness area and set about to create a self-sustaining estate such as those he'd seen in his European travels.

He named his holdings Biltmore Estate from his ancestral Dutch town of Bildt and the English word moor, which is an open, rolling landscape.

His next decisions were critical ones: Who would design not only the house itself, but the gardens that would surround it?

Richard Morris Hunt, the first American to study at the prestigious Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris and one of the founders of the American Institute of Architecture, was selected to design the house. Hunt is also know for his design of The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, the pedestal base of the Statue of Liberty and the Tribune Building in New York City, the latter being one of the first buildings with an elevator. Together, Hunt and Vanderbilt decided on a French Renaissance chateau design with a limestone façade and a steeply pitched roof.

Vanderbilt and Hunt not only created an architectural wonder, but a technological one as well. Biltmore House had all of the latest technology of its time. Central heating, indoor plumbing for all thirty-four bedrooms, electricity, mechanical   more >>