One night over dinner, Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner decided to write a satire skewering the postbellum culture of excess. They took their novel’s title from a line in Shakespeare’s King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” The Gilded Age emerged as a delicious mockery of the over-the-top extravagance of America’s new-rich industrialists, whose ethics anticipated Mae West’s belief that “too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
In real life, America’s Gilded Age, which took its name from their novel, was a conflicted era of great wealth and gross disparity—of recently arrived immigrants streaming into factories and industrial barons summering in Newport “cottages.”
But not all the super-rich trekked to Newport. Denise Kiernan’s The Last Castle tells the story of one wealthy scion who diverged. George Washington Vanderbilt was the youngest son of shipping and rail magnate William Henry Vanderbilt, who had amassed the greatest private fortune of the era. George grew up in a block-long mansion on Fifth Avenue, but while his older brothers joined the family business, he preferred the world of art and books. When his father died in 1885, he used his inheritance to follow his interests.
George’s personal ambitions were as enormous as his father’s, but instead of vast transportation systems, his dream led him to create something of extraordinary beauty: His Biltmore House became the largest and grandest private castle in America.
He discovered the site for Biltmore by accident. To help his mother recover from malaria, George took her by train from New York to a resort sanitarium in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. Asheville had a growing reputation as a healthful place where well-heeled visitors “could heal lungs ailing from tuberculosis or the suffocating by-products of the industrial age.” They could sit on “breathing porches” and inhale the curative, fresh mountain air.
Asheville suddenly struck Vanderbilt as the perfect site for an estate—a place, Kiernan writes, “where he would make his mark, far from the rocky shore of Newport, where straw boaters and candy-striped umbrellas dotted a tired scene he knew too well.” After this epiphany he began buying up parcels of land and organizing the team that would make his dream house a reality.
Vanderbilt first lured Frederick Law Olmsted to Asheville in 1888. At 67, Olmsted was recognized as the father of landscape architecture in America, with Central Park and the U.S. Capitol grounds among his most notable designs. Olmsted was, upon first impression, underwhelmed by Vanderbilt’s site—much of the first-growth timber had already been lumbered or “skinned by poor white farmers.” But he spotted opportunity and suggested creating a managed forest: “It would be of great value to the country to have a thoroughly well organized and systematically conducted attempt in forestry made on a large scale.”
Vanderbilt also enlisted architect Richard Morris Hunt, described here as “no dilettante in the realm of Gilded Age extravagance.” He had designed the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, the great hall of the Metropolitan Museum, and many grand homes of the super-rich. As Kiernan writes, “If architectural excess were a religion, Hunt was surely its patron saint.” He was the perfect architect for building grandeur—for ballrooms and parlors decorated with precious art, glittering chandeliers, and ornate Italian marble.
By January 1889, the Vanderbilt-Olmsted-Hunt triumvirate was in place and work began in earnest. Vanderbilt went forward with Olmsted’s idea of creating a school of managed forestry; he also wanted the estate to have a farm and a village where workers and employees could live.
Meanwhile, the plans for the mansion kept growing. Hunt told Vanderbilt that the mountains surrounding the site were “just the right size and scale for the chateau” he was envisioning. The edifice also needed a name, and Vanderbilt announced in early 1890 that his mansion would be called “Biltmore” in honor of his Dutch ancestor, Jan Aartsen van der Bilt.
With construction underway, in June 1898 George Vanderbilt, then 35 years old, married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser. Edith was descended from one of Dutch New York’s founding families, her face noted (in the words of a Biltmore forester) for “sparkling with kindness, sweetness, lovability, grace and womanliness.” Vanderbilt introduced her to the estate by driving her up the swerving three-mile approach road Olmsted had designed: After a 45-minute ride, a vista opened magically to reveal the mansion.
Biltmore indeed was breathtaking: Surrounded by 125,000 acres, the mansion had a 780-foot façade and an interior of 175,000 square feet containing 250 rooms, 43 bathrooms (with hot and cold running water), 3 kitchens, 65 fireplaces, and a 72-foot-long banquet hall. This grand private castle was exactly what George Van-der-bilt had envisioned for his priceless collection of art, antiques, tapestries, and books.
Edith immediately established herself over the household. She was interested in gardens and would work closely with Gifford Pinchot, who had been hired to establish Biltmore’s school of managed forestry—America’s first such school. In The Last Castle, Edith is depicted as both an accomplished hostess to wealthy friends and as someone who helped look after the laborers, farmers, and shop owners connected to the estate. Her most important contribution was to develop the area’s arts and crafts; starting around 1903, she established the Biltmore Estate Industries, which became known for quality woodworking crafts, yarns, and handwoven fabrics.
In 1914, George died of a heart attack—a complication of a routine appendectomy. He was just 51. He left Biltmore to Edith and their daughter Cornelia (then 40 and 13, respectively). But his enormous wealth had been vastly diminished by Biltmore’s demands. To reduce expenses, Edith had to sell off parcels of the land; 86,700 acres were sold to the U.S. government “to perpetuate my husband’s pioneer work in forest conservation, and to insure the protection” of the forest for the use of the American people.
In 1925 Edith married Peter Goelet Gerry, a senator from Rhode Island, and her focus no longer centered on Biltmore. Five years later, the family decided to open the house to paying tourists to help defray the estate’s costs, which included an annual tax bill of $50,000.
Biltmore’s glory years in the late-19th and early-20th centuries had made it a destination for the famous—Edith Wharton, Henry James, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Wolfe, and Theodore Roosevelt were among the many who graced its long table. But as the story moves further into the 20th century, Biltmore fails to attract such colorful characters, and the final third of Kiernan’s book loses momentum. One notable highlight: The mansion was the secure site for the National Gallery’s collection during World War II; George Vanderbilt would have been pleased that over $26 million of the nation’s art was kept safe at Biltmore.
Daughter Cornelia occasionally lived at Biltmore in the 1920s, but the estate wasn’t lively enough for her, and in 1932 she left Biltmore forever to live in New York, Paris, and London. Edith died in Providence in 1958 and bequeathed Biltmore to her grandsons, who have kept it afloat as a tourist attraction. (George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil, now in his 90s, is still the owner and operator of Biltmore Farms; his younger brother William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil, who ran the Biltmore Estate, died last October at 89.)
Denise Kiernan’s book offers an entertaining and meticulously researched glimpse into faded grandeur. The book admittedly suffers because Biltmore has for much of the past century lacked fascinating personalities to illuminate its magnificence. Still, The Last Castle will appeal to audiences who delighted in Downton Abbey and who look forward to its creator Julian Fellowes’s new series—aptly titled The Gilded Age.
Amy Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.
