Day: January 18, 2024

Asheville

As an aside: because of either planned arrival times or bad weather, we had to bypass the Kentucky Museum of American Pocket Knives, the American Museum of the House Cat, and the National Bird Dog Museum. Sorry for those of you who would have liked to see them. We did, however, go to the first KFC restaurant, in Corbin, KY, which evolved from a service station to a cafe to a worldwide chain of restaurants. There is more Colonel Sanders memorabilia than I could have imagined.

From Pigeon Forge we went to Asheville, NC after we realized it was only two hours away. Our original plan was to stay in Asheville for three days only, but as soon as we started looking around, we realized that we wanted to stay longer—not because there was so much to do, but because the city was so nice. It has much of its early 20th century architecture, many excellent restaurants and art galleries, and a definite hipster vibe. Basically, any building that could have been turned into an artists’ market, a coffee bar, or a restaurant, has been.

George Washington Vanderbilt painted by John Singer Sargent as a young man. Tell me he wasn’t a hipster.

The gem of Asheville is the Biltmore Estate, the home of George Washington Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt—the grandson of railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt—had the home constructed in 1889-1895. It remains the largest privately-owned house in the U.S., with 33 bedrooms and 43 bathrooms and 250 rooms overall—a particularly impressive size given that the Vanderbilt household consisted of only him, his wife, and his daughter. It’s also impressive given that George Vanderbilt was an art collector, was not involved in the family business, and built the house entirely from his inheritance.

The Vanderbilts seem to have used the house mostly for week-long house parties. Let’s see how the other half lives. (Click on each photo for a better view.)

This is the Tapestry Room, a 90-foot-long gallery hung with wool and silk Flemish tapestries from the 1500s.
The Billiard Room, easily accessible from the Bachelors’ Wing.
The dining room, with a 70-foot vaulted ceiling and a table that holds 38.
The breakfast room, which holds two John Singer Sargent portraits and two small Renoirs.
The library, with more than 23,000 leather-bound volumes.
Vanderbilt’s bedroom.
Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bedroom.
The Oak Room between the two bedrooms, with a portrait of daughter Cornelia.
One of the many guest bedrooms.
The basement bowling alley. A servant stood behind the right rear column to reset the pins and return the balls.
The indoor swimming pool.
The gymnasium.

We were not allowed to take many photographs of the backstairs areas, but the quarters for the servants who lived onsite were, for the time, comfortable. There were 21 rooms on the top level for maids and the guests’ maids and nannies, rooms above the stable for male staff, and a few rooms in the basement for the kitchen staff.

One of the nicest bedrooms, probably for the cook or chief housemaid.
One of the kitchens.
One of the pantries.

The original estate was 125,000 acres, which is roughly nine times the size of Manhattan, and it featured a working dairy farm as well as gardens and hunting grounds. The estate’s grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, whose portrait (by Sargent) hangs in the family room. Over the years, land was donated to the U.S. National Park Service or sold to pay for the estate’s expenses, and it now is only 8,000 acres, or just over half the size of Manhattan. Vanderbilt’s descendants still own the property, but have not lived there since 1956.

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