Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - Upstairs, downstairs

We spent the night in Spartanburg SC at our favorite camp ground! We ended up at another Waffle House for breakfast. This is getting boring! We got to the Biltmore Estate in Asheville NC about 11 a.m. What a lovely, long, and tiring day we had there!

Biltmore is the home of George Washington Vanderbilt, the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad magnate. George fell in love with this gorgeous spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains and built his home here. He brought his bride, Edith, to this 250 room mansion in the late 1800’s and it has been in the family ever since. It is a home designed by architect, Richard Morris Hunt. It was built for entertaining; with billiard room, bowling alley, swimming pool, exercise room, and land for hunting and organizing all sorts of outdoor games, and, of course, special rooms for eating, drinking, and smoking.

George’s landscape architect, Frederick Low Olmsted, told him to make part of the land formal gardens, part of it a farm, and leave the rest as forest. George died at age 51, leaving his wife and daughter, Cornelia, to manage the estate. They tried many businesses including selling some of the land. Cornelia married and her husband and children also worked the estate. In the 1930’s they opened it to the public to help promote tourism in the area and to support the estate. It is now a family owned, for profit, business, run by the grandson and his children. They have kept everything in beautiful condition, but some of the business enterprises (winery, gift shop, restaurant, tours, etc) got to be a little overpowering.

However, the mansion is quite spectacular. We toured the first floor with banquet hall, breakfast room, salon, organ loft, music room, and library; all in pristine condition. We took the grand staircase to the second floor where the private family rooms are located; the bedrooms and sitting rooms of the Vanderbilts. A less pretentious staircase led to the third floor. On this floor the guests had their own living quarters. There were bedrooms and bathrooms and a beautiful lounge area for reading and relaxing. Guests would dress formally and go for dinner every evening at 8 p.m.

The servant’s quarters were in the basement. They had private rooms; the women on this floor, the men over the stable; and a separate dining hall. There were several kitchens-pastry,

rotisserie, and main; separate food storage areas for vegetables, canned goods, dry goods, home canned goods, and also refrigerated storage. There was a dumb waiter to bring items to the dining area on the first floor. There was also a huge laundry area, which even had a belt-driven barrel washer and a dryer of sorts.

After taking a break in our camper, we were able to take Mickey as we walked around the gardens. There is a conservatory with beautiful decorative plants, a rose garden, wisteria trellis, the Italian gardens with three formal water gardens, and flower beds of mums planted in the “bedding out” style popular in the 1800s, plus many other trees, shrubs, and flowering plants.