Delphi Study Club members learned about the George Vanderbilt family and their home, Biltmore, from Linda Brown at the club’s March meeting in the Baptist Church Fellowship Hall.
Brown reviewed The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home by Denise Kiernan, American journalist, producer and bestselling author.
Following a visit to Asheville, North Carolina, George Vanderbilt, grandson of busines magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, bought land there and hired well-known architect Richard Morris Hunt to design and build a 250-room chateau. He hired landscape architect Frederick Olmstead, designer of New York City’s Central Park, to create formal gardens. His goal was to have a working farm with a village to support it. The house took six years to construct and covered four acres. It was officially opened for friends and family on Christmas Eve, 1895.
In 1898, Vanderbilt married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, first governor of Dutch colonial New York, and the couple made their home at Biltmore, now an estate of 125,000 acres. A noted conservationist and philanthropist, Vanderbilt built the Shiloh AME church and established several industries. Downturns in the economy and Vanderbilt’s lavish spending caused financial problems, exacerbated by the establishment of the income tax.
Vanderbilt died in 1914, aged 51, and Edith sold approximately 87,000 acres of the estate to the United States Forest Service. The couple’s only child, Cornelia, married John Cecil in 1924. In 1930 the family opened Biltmore to the public. Although Cecil and Cornelia divorced in 1934, he stayed at Biltmore until his death in 1954. while she never returned. Cornelia’s children managed the estate and developed it for the tourist trade.
Brown noted that virtual tours of Biltmore Estate and Biltmore Mansion are available on the website.
Attending the meeting were Linda Brown, hostess Ann Cales, Evelyn Coyle, Beverly Frazier, Gayle Kuchera, Carolyn Ott, Vivian Pemberton, Marjilea Smithheisler and guest Doris Osborn.
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