Biltmore Estate's Fifth-Generation Legacy

Uh, well, it...

the story goes is that George's mother had a bout of tuberculosis, and she'd been living in New York City for some time at that period.

And, uh, he had heard of the, um, kind of medicinal benefits of being out in West North Carolina to become a, a place for, uh, recovery from such ailments.

And he traveled down here in the 1880s with his mother and really just fell in love with the area, the mountain, the mountains in the region.

I feel like the same thing happened to me.

[laughs]

I came down to Asheville and fell in love with it too.

So, uh, Chase, the Biltmore is the largest residential home in the country, and anyone who's a Gilded Age fan knows that it's really the pinnacle of architecture from that time.

Um, two hundred and fifty rooms, I think four acres is maybe inside the house.

Um, and, uh, and it's just, it's just really an incredible, incredible w- what I call an American treasure.

It's an incredible place.

But how did the scale come into being? What, what, what was the original vision, and then what did we end up getting?

Yes.

It was George Vanderbilt who had this big dream to create Biltmore, and he pulled together two of his closest family friends, one being Richard Morris Hunt, who became the architect of the house, and the second being Frederick Law Olmsted, who was the landscape architect for the estate.

And it was really these three men who dreamed up this vision, the scale, the size, and it was the architect Hunt who really encouraged George Vanderbilt to create a house on the scale of the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains.

And it was really through an iterative design process where the house got bigger, that he wanted more space for entertaining, and that's where you ended up with this French Chateau inspired home nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

So speaking of the Blue Ridge Mountains, when people hear the name Biltmore, I'm sure the image of the beautiful home always comes to mind.

But the land is really special and has special meaning as well.

Tell us a little bit about, about the land all around the house.

That's right, Eric.

You mentioned earlier the estate is now eight thousand acres, but back in George Vanderbilt's time, it was actually a hundred and twenty-five thousand acres.

And George Vanderbilt owned as far as you can see from Biltmore House.

And it was really at the advice of Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, that really suggested that George Vanderbilt had an opportunity to experiment, to innovate in the space of sustainable forestry and agriculture.

And that's exactly what they did.

They sought out to hire, um, Gifford Pinchot, who became the first forester at Biltmore and created the first scientific management plan for forestry in America.