Approach to Biltmore

"Visitors to Asheville in past years," wrote a North Carolina correspondent last week, "have been permitted to view Biltmore House from a distance. Through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. John Francis Amherst Cecil . . . tourists will this year be privileged to pass through the huge rooms of the beautiful chateau."

Tourists should be grateful for this approach to Biltmore. In 1890, with Chicago's World Fair (Columbian Exposition ) still three years off, and popular interest in art largely limited to pyrography, china painting and the confection of Turkish cosy corners, George Washington Vanderbilt, sensitive, shy, 22-year-old grandson of Commodore Cornelius, commissioned the bearded Beaux-Artist Richard Morris Hunt to build for him the finest private house in America. Architect Hunt, who had already sprinkled Newport and Fifth

Avenue with palaces, considered that the proper kind of a house to build in Asheville, N. C., was an exact replica of a Renaissance French chateau.

For five years British and Scottish stonemasons chipped and hammered in the Asheville woods while Mr. Vanderbilt toured Europe, sending back carload after carload of French furniture, Gothic cabinets, Jacobean tables, Japanese ivories. On Christmas day, 1895, Vanderbilts assembled to walk through the magnificent gardens laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead, designer of New York's Central Park, to attend the official housewarming of Biltmore House. An assembled chateau, it is designed chiefly after the Chateau de Blois. There was nothing in North America to approach it; no other Vanderbilt had so fine a home.

Biltmore originally covered 125,000 acres of North Carolina land, has been reduced by turning one section into a forest reservation, another into a village, to 11,500 acres. To house the 2,000 people employed on the estate, Paternalist Vanderbilt built a model village in the English Cheshire style, now a suburb of Asheville. Biltmore's first Chief Forester was Gifford Pinchot, later (1923-27) Governor of Pennsylvania. Here until his death in 1914 lived George Washington Vanderbilt, studying the dialects of the American Indian in his ornate library, helping his North Carolina tenants with their farming, issuing mildly autocratic decrees. He willed Biltmore to his only child, Cornelia, who was destined to wed the Hon. John Francis Amherst Cecil. Last week she graciously agreed to admit the U. S. public to her domain.

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