George Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate

With four acres of floor space and over thirty bedrooms, the opulent Biltmore Estate occupies a unique place in the history of the United States. In this episode, Candace and Sarah trace the history of the Vanderbilt family and their magnificent estate.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm a Candas and Candis and
I are going to be talking about one of our
favorite historical homes today. Um. It reminded me a lot

(00:23):
of the Hearst Castle episode recorded about a year ago.
It's really fun to talk about these amazing palaces, I think,
and even interesting homes that have intriguing stories behind them,
like when we did in an old vintage podcast about
the Winchester Mystery House. Sometimes it's the people behind the
home that make for the great story. Yeah, and if

(00:43):
you've been there and seeing some of the rooms they
lived in, it really adds a lot to, I don't know,
to your understanding of them. So the house will be
talking about today is built More Estate, which is nestled
in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. And if you've
never been, you really have to go to understand why
it is so proudly and majestically referred to as America's

(01:06):
largest home trademark trademark. That's um, yeah, I mean it
is amazing place. It's got four acres of floor space.
It has two D and fifty rooms. That's thirty four bedrooms,
forty three bathroom. Don't try to use any of those, No, No,
And I think people try to get a peek at
the bathrooms. You can't really see them, though. They have

(01:28):
a mirror set up that you can get just the
tiniest reflection of one. It also has sixty five fireplaces,
and it was one of the first homes built that
had electricity and underfloor heating, plus elevators. And the basement
level is so fascinating. It's got an indoor bowling alley, pool, gymnasium,

(01:50):
locker room, slash, changing areas and that's also where the
kitchen and the servants quarters are too. Even changing areas
that does not sound like it would be particularly interesting,
but we're talking about twenty male changing rooms, twenty female
changing room, the guests. Yeah, everything about this house is
opulent in every way. So okay, But to understand the house,

(02:12):
we have to understand the family that built it and
understand their whole history, which is quite a long one.
And this is of course the illustrious Vanderbilt family, which
originally they came from Holland. There the Vanderbilts, Like, I
just think that's a great They should have stuck with that,
I think. I agree, vanderbuilt university. What if they more exciting,

(02:35):
I think so. So they came to America from Holland
in the late sixteen hundreds. But for a really long time,
for many generations, they were just this successful, but modestly
living farming family, you know, not not the ostentatious um
family that they eventually became. It wasn't until Cornelius Vanderbilt,

(02:57):
who's better known as Commodore Vanderbilt, that the family really
rose to great heights. And he built his fortune in
steamships and railroads and had thirteen children with his wife.
So when he died in eighteen seventy seven, he had
a fortune of one hundred million dollars, which I mean

(03:18):
that's for the time, quite considerable today. Um. And so
when he died, he left the majority of that fortune
to his eldest son, William Henry. He kind of considered
some of his younger son's waste rolls, and he thought
that William Henry would be the only one who could
carry on the family business, and he did very successfully.

(03:38):
He continued to build upon the family fortune. And while
William Henry was active on the business scene, his wife
was working the social angle because the Vanderbilts were still
considered new money, so she was helping to build the
family prestige. Yeah, a lot of the old money in
New York society was continuing to snub the Vanderbilts. If
you've ever read The Age of Innocence, you have pretty

(04:00):
good sense of of how this would go down. So
the Vanderbilts commissioned this amazing mansion on Fifth Avenue. It's
going to have fifty nine rooms, was built in eighty one,
and it could hold their huge art collection. And during
this time, Vanderbilt children, all sorts of cousins are building
these amazing mansions in Rhode Island in New York. It's really, uh,

(04:25):
it's building time for this family to vanderbilding time. Yes,
I think so. They're definitely cementing their place in society. Um.
At the time, this Fifth Avenue house seems pretty grotesque
to some people. Louis H. Sullivan called it a contradiction,
an absurdity, a characteristically New York absurdity. But it set

(04:45):
a certain style and it caught on with the rest
of society. Suddenly the Vanderbilts were in now and during
this time, during the construction of this mansion, we have
George Washington Vanderbilt growing up. He was the youngest child
of eight William Henry's children, and he was born in
eighteen sixty two, and he was the only kid who

(05:06):
was still living at home when the Fifth Avenue Palace
was completed. So I mean he grew up with construction.
He grew up with palaces and opulence. I think it
definitely affected his later life, as we will see. And
even though young George was doted upon by his parents,
he was definitely a family favorite. He was very much

(05:27):
unlike his brothers, who were more invested in the family business.
George was interested in books. He started collecting them when
he was a boy, and when he was twelve years old,
actually he started noting all the titles of the books
that he had read. And when he died, he had
noted more than three thousand, one fifty nine centuries of books.
And Sarah did the math, and that averages out to

(05:49):
eighty one books a year. He died at only fifty one,
so I mean, I can't even imagine how many books
he would have read if he had lived another twenty
thirty years. And you may be thinking that an awful
lot of time for reading. But he was the original
man of leisure. He had nothing to do but invest
himself in his studies. He learned all kinds of foreign languages, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin,

(06:13):
Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Hebrew sanscrit and even later some
different Native American languages. Yeah, and he studied art. He
read a lot of philosophy. He was very interested in traveling.
I mean, of course, all the Vanderbilts are visiting Europe,
but he would tour Asia and Africa as well. And
he used these travels to of course collect art and

(06:36):
interesting pieces for his Fifth Avenue home, but also a
lot of books. He ends up with a library of
twenty three thousand volumes. So I mean, this is a
very learned man. He's not formally educated, but he was
privately tutored and obviously spends all of his free time reading.

(06:56):
He's he's intelligent, and he knows that he's going to
be taken care of for the rest of his life,
even though he does have a considerably smaller share in
the family fortune than his elder brothers. But he's gonna
be all right. He's set, and when he comes of
a certain age, he realizes that he needs his own
mansion to call his own. When he's traveling to North Carolina,

(07:20):
he saw Asheville and had a winter resort reputation, so
he went there to scope it out, and he realizes
that this is where he wants to build his mansion,
and it seems like a bit of an odd choice,
the mountains of North Carolina, when most of his family
is situated in cities further north. The Rhode Island is
their country spot sort of. But he realizes that he

(07:44):
can buy tons of land and build an empire for himself,
so in eight and eighties he starts his buying spree. Yeah,
this is a strange little fact, and I couldn't find
it online, but I remember it from some of the
literature at the house itself. But a currently, once local
landowners got wind of a Vanderbilt coming around buying up land,

(08:07):
they started holding out for a little bit more so
they'd have sort of a broken down barn or farm
house and a few acres surrounding it, and they would
hold out Vanderbilt came along and paid a pretty penny
for it because very smart. He didn't want this old
farm in the middle of the now. But by eight
eighty nine he was ready to start construction on the house.

(08:31):
And he didn't just hire any old architect to do it.
He hired Richard Morris Hunt, who by this point had
a famous reputation for building these mansions for these elite
New York families. He had also built the New York
Tribeane Building, which at one point was the tallest building
in the world. So, yeah, this is a top notch

(08:51):
architect to hire for your estate. After six years of construction,
Vanderbilt decides that the home is ready to be opened officially,
officially open in its current condition, but it's never really
finished and we're going to talk more about that a
little bit later. But you couldn't see that money eventually
just ran out. There are rooms that are undone, there

(09:14):
were rooms that were conceptualized but never completed. Uh. One
of the biggest features of the house, the Grand Oregon,
is actually artificial facause fake pipes. He didn't have the
money to buy real pipes, and um, you can still
see an unfinished room at the house today. To give
you an idea of what the house would have been like.

(09:34):
So it was kind of like one of those beautiful
Faberge eggs. It's gorgeous and ornate on the outside, but
maybe on the inside. You open it and it's hollow spots,
hollow spots, right yeah, but I mean in people didn't
know that yet. It seemed likely to be completed, and
it was amazing and opulent. And he named it built

(09:57):
More from Built, which was the ancestral home of the
Vanderbilt and more comes from the word like for rolling uplands,
so it's a nice estate name. He's got all this land,
and because it's so remote at the time, the construction
of it is pretty unbelievable. I mean, they have to

(10:19):
build a three mile railroad spur just to get all
of the supplies. They're all that Indiana limestone. They have
to build a brick works on site. Um. So it's
its own little city, and actually there is a city
attached to it, right. He always envisioned the chateau is
an operating, working estate, and the dairy on the Biltmore

(10:40):
grounds became largely successful, and that was what was the
now unintended cash cow for several years for the family. Yeah,
so should we talk about the estate a little bit.
I mean, to get a real picture of it, you
you do need to go there, or at least go online.
There's a virtual tour you can sort of walk through
these rooms. But I mean, what's your favorite part of it, Candice,

(11:03):
I would have to say the basement level. It's so
fascinating to me, and that didn't open until the nineteen eighties.
But down there you can see the kitchen and the pantry,
and that's always so fascinating to me. I like seeing
how people cooked in the olden days. And the swimming
The swimming pool is really fascinating to see. There's no
water in it, so you can see all of the

(11:25):
in late tile and the dramatic slope from the shallow
wind to the deep end and down there also is
the Halloween room, which I always thought was so cute
because Cornelia and her friends had transformed it when Halloween
evening with these whimsical drawings on the walls. And I
thought that was adorable, thinking that they were very young children,

(11:46):
and come to find out, I think they went there
at late twenties or so when she did this, so
probably a champagne fueled party. How nice to be the
only child of George Vanderbilt. Yeah, I really like the
tapestry room upstairs has hung with all of these beautiful
Flemish tapestries, and I think at Christmas they actually set

(12:06):
out Christmas trees just every turn of every tapistry. Unbelievable
Christmas at Biltmore's. You just have to experience it. But
as impressive as the house is, I think the most
amazing thing about visiting is when you look outside and
you can't see anything but mountains, amazingly manicured grounds surrounding

(12:28):
you forest. I mean, you can't even see like a
watch tower, a fire watch tower off in the distance
or something. You feel like you're in a completely different time.
And that was a very important aspect of this manner
of state for Vanderbilt. He wanted it to be his
own private kingdom, almost and so he hired the number

(12:49):
one landscape designer in the country at the time, Frederick
law Olmstead, to make sure that he got the effect
he wanted. And if you've heard that name, it's because
alms Dead had to huge reputation at the time. He
had designed Central Park, he had worked on Prospect Park,
Faremont Park, belle Isle Park, and even the Capital Grounds
in d C. And he also contributed to turning Yosemite

(13:13):
into a public park. Yeah, and he was an old
Vanderbilt friend too, so it's not too surprising that he
got called to this job. They were neighbors from Staten Island. Um,
so he's brought in pretty early before the construction even
starts in to consult and decide the master plan for
this estate. And he tells George that he thinks the

(13:35):
house should have nice formal gardens surrounding it that fit
with the style farms in the bottom lands by the river,
so it could, you know, really function as a self
sustaining its day exactly. And then forest, and they're nearly
one twenty five thousand acres of forest at at this
point at least, and a lot of it was cut over,

(13:57):
so it's not pristine and beautiful. It's been chopped for farmland,
and a lot of the farmland was pretty worn out
by this point. And because Vanderbult was so interested in
preserving and conserving the land, he worked to renovate this
forest essentially. So Olmstead started the process by bringing in

(14:21):
for men who could call the existing forest, and this
essentially meant cutting down the trees that were unhealthy and
clearing space to replant new trees. And among the projects
in the forest, he also added three hundred acres of
white pine. Yeah, and he covered the whole project too,
because he knew that this was pretty significant research in

(14:43):
forestry and it might set a new standard, and Vanderbolt
was actually hoping to do just that. So Olmstead brought
on Gifford peen Show, who only left built more to
go on to head up the U. S. Forest Service.
So that gives you a pretty good idea of how
significant this project was. Um And in nineteen fourteen some

(15:04):
of the estate land was sold to make a national forest,
which is why you have those vistas today. It's still preserved.
In addition to the significant forest on built Mars estate,
there was also a model farm that was a working
farm and some of the hands who lived there would

(15:25):
raise Jersey cows and pedigree hogs, and Sarah had pointed
out that In Vanderbilt's New York Times obituary, the writer
noted that some of his prize hogs would sell for
five hundred to eight hundred dollars and that's in ninety
so I'm serious. But of course it's not all this

(15:46):
farmland and forested land. There are these very formal planned
gardens around the home and that's what Olmstead really worked
carefully on along with Richard Morris Hunt, and they step
to that French Renaissance theme of the home, which has
these exterior staircases and the limestone and the turrets and

(16:08):
it's it's very ornate and the gardens match that. And
we're not going to go over every garden again. You
can look at pictures and take your own tour, but
the approaches is kind of a significant part of it.
It's three miles long, and as soon as you pull
off the road you have just left everything else behind.

(16:29):
That's where your vision suddenly. You can't see the outside
buildings and everything like that. You're just on this little
road going through the forest. And I think it's interesting.
But Olmstead was almost trying to create a sub tropical
forest when he laid this out. He put in a
lot of bamboo just to make these northern visitors, you know,

(16:50):
these family members from New York and friends feel warm
and cozy here in Asheville which is not a not
a central it's cold, it's up in mountains, but he
figured out which plants could survive up there and live
through the winter and put them in In addition to
the approach. Some other significant gardens that you should note

(17:11):
if and when you visit built more include the Italian Garden,
which features symmetrical pools and lawns and statues. And Olmsted
thought that this would be a place where the family
would gather outdoors to play tennis and to converse, maybe
to take their cocktails. Another garden was the shrub Garden,
which is not too exciting to me. It's it's shrubs,

(17:34):
but five different species of them. Then the walled Garden,
which is where you can see a split between the
ideas of Vanderbilt and Olmsted almost thought an edible garden
would be old fashioned country ornamental garden, almost right. The
Vanderbilt wanted it to be more ornate and showy, so
it has plenty of flowers in there too. Yeah. And

(17:56):
then there's the Conservatory um, which of course is the
nurse for all of the grounds, and it's a pretty
interesting looking building itself too. Um. But you know, you
could you could spend ages, I think, just wandering around
looking at all these different gardens, even after you've left
the house. Despite the picturesque location and the attention and

(18:19):
time that had been devoted to constructing a beautiful chateau.
Uh As we had mentioned earlier, a lot of bill
warm was left unfinished. And perhaps I was too harsh
a critic earlier because I live in a two bedroom
condo and one bedroom is fully functioning and the other
one has a bunch of stuff in it and it
is not on display for guests. So I can completely

(18:41):
empathize with George Vanderbilt. He started this very ambitious two
fifty room project. It's understandable that some rooms would not
be open to the public. However, when you leave places unfinished,
and you leave equipment around, and there's debris and and
workers coming in and out of your home, it's bound

(19:02):
to fall into disrepair. And that is exactly what happened
to build. More So, as Sarah mentioned, he abruptly stopped
work on the house. He'd been investing about two fifty
thousand dollars per year on maintenance and construction, and he
reduced his budget to seventy thousand dollars so that's a
significant cut. He came up with a few cost cutting solutions.

(19:26):
One was leasing out the land for hunting. Another was
selling off important pieces of art, putting in fake pipes,
putting in fake pipes. But unfortunately he couldn't figure out
a good budgetary plan before he died. So Edith, his widow,
was left to oversee the completion of the estate, and
one of her solutions, as Sarah said to, was to

(19:47):
sell off the forest land which contributed to Pisca National Forest.
But she was adamant about keeping fourteen thousand acres around
the home, and this was to ensure the family's privacy.
The Vantibiles were pretty serious about their privacy too, and
there started to be rumors that Edith would eventually sell
the house and turn it into some sort of hotel
and there you could stay in the built more where

(20:10):
the Vanderbilt slept. But Edith really loved the house, and
even though she had plenty of other homes around the country,
this one had a special place in her heart. After all,
it's the house her husband had so fully devoted himself to.
That's where she gave birth to her only child. Yeah,
she'd come back of her Christmas to give gifts to

(20:30):
the Built More employees. It was important to her and
she was starting to get sort of more of a
public role herself. She was uh launching a career in
North Carolina politics and society. And her daughter came of
age and married an Englishman, John Francis, Amherst Cecil in

(20:50):
n The wedding was that Built More. So that's another
important life event for this family that took place there.
But she really didn't want to have to sell it
off or turn it into a hotel or something like that.
She was looking for an alternative, definitely. The Vanderbilts never
gave up on Builtmore, and the Cecil's actually began living

(21:12):
at Builtmore and they took an apartment in a wing
on the north end of the home, but the majority
of the home stayed dark and it was still in
disrepair at this point because it was simply too big
to be maintained at their budget. And I was chatting
with Sarah earlier about this, and that just sounds like
terrible conditions for newly weds to be in a tiny

(21:33):
apartment can find in a very dark home, just kind
of scary, not really romantic. But John Cecil actually became
very attached to build more, and I think it spoke
to his English gentleman's sensibilities. He liked being in the country,
he liked hunting, he liked exploring the grounds, whereas Cornelia,
like her mother Edith, preferred life in the city. This

(21:57):
was really significant, Asheville had been pleasing with the Vanderbilts
to open up built more for tourism to help offsette
some of the trouble that the country had been having
from the Great Depression. They thought that if Asheville could
have a spot for tourists to flock to, it really
helped the city, so they agreed to do so. Just
five per cent of the house was available for public viewing.

(22:20):
Tickets were two dollars, and that guaranteed that you could
see some highlights in the home like Napoleon's chest set
and Cardinal Richelieu's flemished tapestries, which the massive library and
great works of art by the likes of John Singer Sergeant,
But it didn't have that sort of warmth and electricity

(22:41):
that the home had when George and Edith were installed there.
Cornelia just didn't have that sense to her. She was
not a natural hostess. Uh, But we think that maybe
her guarded nous was what created the mystery around the
home and made it even more attractive to the tourists
who wanted to see it, because before the Secil's publicly
opened it, it had been totally off limits. On Wednesday

(23:03):
and Saturday afternoons, you could drive the grounds and if
the family was not at home, you could approach the facade,
but if they were anywhere on property, you would just
stay completely away. Yeah, I mean, even the Queen offers
a better deal than that or some of her home.
So then something pretty major happened in this whole house history.

(23:24):
The Cecil's divorced and John stayed at the bill More
because it, just as we mentioned earlier, it appealed to
him as an Englishman, and Cornelia was happier in the city,
so that's where she went. But John's propriety, this englishness
about him, had a very influential effect on the whole

(23:46):
tone of the house. He sort of set the propriety right,
and he would have grown up in a country where
people toward his storic homes and just let themselves in
and took them. Rambled about tours and rambled about that's
how things were done in England and even in some
other European countries, and so that's how he thought that
things should be done at built More, and that was
a mentality that was passed down to his son William.

(24:10):
So the house continues to be in pretty dismal state.
And not only that, but Cornelia is taking pieces of
furniture and art to furnish her apartments elsewhere in the country.
Uh So John's doing what he can to make it
look presentable, which means polishing wood, oiling, leather, replacing curtains.
But there's just no money. And so of their two children,

(24:31):
George and William, George is given a hand in the dairy,
the built More dairy, which, as we mentioned, with those
really high press hogs, is pretty profitable at the time.
But William is strangely fascinated by the house, and he
is a determined young man and he really thinks that
he can make a profit from built More. No one
believes that he can do so, and William cecil even

(24:53):
once said I was made painfully aware that the future
was drab, and while I might be a fifty percent
stockholder of the company, the only thing of value other
than the contents of the house with the dairy. So
thus begins the age of William Cecil trying to make
this house that he was going to inherit into a

(25:14):
profitable business, something he wouldn't just lose or have to
sell off. And he did it by new built more
tourism and employment contributed three hundred and fifty million dollars
to the local economy of Asheville. Um. So it worked.
It worked. It took a long time and a lot
of experimentation and a lot of different efforts, some of

(25:37):
which worked and which failed miserably. But before I go
further into this, I just want to stop and recommend
a book called Lady on the Hill by Howard E. Covington, Jr.
Which is where I did most of my research for
what I'm about to tell you. It's a fabulous book.
William Amhurst Vanderbilt Cecil is an interesting character. He's he's
lovable as that stadio British type who wants everything done

(26:01):
his way. But that's okay because his way is really
successful and his ideas are really good. And he had
a couple of ideas about your responsibility when you live
on a big estate, you have to preserve it, you
have to improve it, and you have to leave it
in improved condition than what it was when it was
handed to you. And he's also famous for saying, I
don't preserve built more to make a profit. I make

(26:23):
a profit to preserve built More. That saying is plastered
around Built everywhere, everywhere. So here's the history as to
how he made built more profitable. In the nineteen fifties,
this is when tourists in America are taking to the
highways in their cars, and Built Moore was in a
competitive region in North Carolina. Cherokee had just been established

(26:45):
and you may be familiar with the famous outdoor drama
under these Hills that launched around that era there. And
then nearby Grandfather Mountain had just built a swinging bridge,
so people were going to the Indian Reservation and then
they were going to see the mountains that not all
of them made it to this historic home, but those
who did in this time could literally park their cars

(27:06):
right outside built marsh front door. And there are pictures
of this. And it's so strange because today if you
visited or you play a visit, you know that you
have to park way far away and you're shuttled in
by bus to the front door. You just hike through
this little path in the woods. Yes, it's uh, I
mean again partly maintaining that majesty of the approach. I
think keeping the station wagons out of the front lawn

(27:29):
doesn't look as nice. And what else are how Bolster
built Moore's reputation during this time is that it became
a focal point of a major Hollywood movie that Sarah
talked about in an earlier podcast. Yeah, the Swan with
Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness, which was filmed in nineteen
and it played an important role in our Princess Grace

(27:53):
marriage wedding episode. Um, but that helped so much and tourism.
Tourism shot up third percent after people went out and
saw this movie and saw this beautiful facade in these
lovely grounds. And that's what bothered William Cecil is that
the Hollywood sparkle wasn't the reality. The house was still
in shambles except for what the tourists could see. It

(28:15):
was structurally sound, but the carpets for threadbare, the flags
in the banquet hall were falling apart, and no money
had really been invested in it since nineteen fifteen, So
Cecil was determined to make it profitable, to get something
out of it, And he was somewhat of an outsider
among a lot of the staff, which their local people
who have lived there most of their lives. He has

(28:38):
this English accent. He was educated as at Harvard, as
you mentioned earlier, Um, and he calls himself quote a
New York banker corrupted by Washington. So he's gonna he's
gonna stand and stand out. And not only was he
an outsider at Builtmore, but he was also an outsider
in the realm of historic sites because he didn't approve

(29:00):
of period costumes and petting zoos like the kind you
would find in colonial Williamsburg. And Builtmore wasn't considered to
have the same historic and educational clout as a city
like Charleston. It was entirely in its own category. And
not to mention, after all those years, it was still
privately owned. Yeah, So when Interstate forty came through in

(29:20):
the nineteen sixties, more people were coming to Asheville than ever,
and Cecil wanted to make sure that they definitely came
by Built More. His first few years in the house,
Built More only had three thousand visitors annually, and most
of those visitors came during the summer months when they
could tour the beautiful grounds and have picnics and that

(29:41):
sort of thing. In the winter, a lot of times
nobody would come at all, which is so strange when
you think of Asheville's history as a winter tourist spot,
it seems like that would be the number one season
for them. But then consider stepping into a giant drafty
helm and you get an idea as to why it
wasn't a exactly a welcoming site. So he had a

(30:02):
couple of strategies. One, he had to make cosmetic updates
to the home too. He had to change the way
the visitors would treated. He wanted them to be treated
like guests like his grandfather, George Vanderbilt might have treated them,
instead of them being pain tourists. And this is when
we see his old world model of country homes installed
a built more let people stroll and explore on their own.

(30:25):
He's not gonna put up do not touch signs. He's
just gonna block off areas very subtly with a velvet rope.
That's how his grandfather would have wanted it, and when
they were coming to build more in the nineteen fifties,
they were still following this nineteen thirties era tour that
had been set up when Cornelia and John Cecaul first
opened the home. So they just saw a couple of
rooms downstairs and upstairs. And so he thought that he

(30:48):
had to show more of the house in order to
give people a reason to come back to build more,
because a lot of people would come once, say they've
seen it, and then never return, and that was bad business.
So he didn't encourage guided tours though this wasn't This
wasn't like touring some bunker or civil war site where
you have your reenactor who tells you everything you need

(31:10):
to know. But there were still people on site to
answer questions, you know, friendly docents around every corner. And
he also put a stop to a lot of the
old house myths that had been going along, like Vanderbilt
supposedly had Julius Caesar's bathtub installed, not true. He wanted
the house to to stand on its own merits, not

(31:32):
be some lie. Essentially, another thing he did that really
increased tourism was to reconsider advertising prior to see still
taking over management. At built Moore, the advertising budget was
one thousand dollars per year. By the nine sixties he'd
increase that to nine thousand dollars. He ran a gardening

(31:54):
column in the local paper written by Builtmore gardeners from
their point of view. He created this fant has to
add campaign about Alice who was a curious visitor, and
the Mountain Queen, and these became very popular ads. And
he also planned event to draw people year round. Uh
In the warmer months he had the Zelia Festival to
combat the drop in tourism, and the in the cold

(32:16):
winter months, he had Christmas at built More. By attendance
was at thousand, and previously it had hovered around thirty
five thousand. Yeah, and with the oil crisis in the seventies,
he took it up another notche even to really bring
in visitors. He finished the music room and the salon
on the ground floor, and he hired North Carolina builders

(32:39):
to do all the work so it was authentic and
helping the local economy. And his rebuilding projects kind of
threw off preservationists, though it didn't always seem to fit
the model they were used to write. Preservationists by definition
like to preserve spaces and history as they were. But

(33:00):
his philosophy always was this is how George Vanderbilt would
have wanted it. He would have wanted a clean and
opulent space to show his visitors, not faded tapestries and
something that looks like it's been sitting for decades. Now
certainly not so. After about twenty years managing the home,
he's able to make a substantial profit. Now it's about

(33:20):
three point five million dollars, and that's not just from
ticket sales. He realized that food is a valuable asset.
He realized that he could make a significant amount of
money from selling food and selling souvenirs and that sort
of thing. All this all the stuff that tourists like.
And in fact, he once even said that um tourists

(33:43):
every twenty minutes stopped to eat something, buy something, or
use the bathroom. I think that plays into your stodgy
English from the descriptions. And to that end, he served
the tourist's best interests. He built more public restroom, he
installed air conditioning in the home, built more restaurant, sold
him ice cream. Uh. And one of the things that

(34:05):
he did that wasn't too popular at first was he
opened a winery at Builtmore. This was his concept of
built More by the bottle, and he didn't even have
a license to sell alcohol when he first started experimenting,
so it was a doomed project from the start that
took a long time to get off the ground. Yeah,
I mean, you can't just jump into the wine business

(34:26):
and expect a lot of success. But eventually he realized,
and eventually the winery turned a profit too. Yeah. He
hired Frenchman Philippe Jordan to come in and oversee the
project from scratch, and that was in And here's something
to give you an idea of just how far Built
Moore had come at this point. In three he made
the executive decision to construct a winery on the site

(34:50):
where the dairy barn had once stood, which was the
old moneymaker exactly. Uh. So he builds his winery and
it turns its first profit around two thousand four, So
good job, Cecil. I would venture to say that the
winery with Cecil's last big project, Built Moore had its

(35:10):
centennial celebration, and at the end of the celebration he
handed over the reins to his son Bill. But he
couldn't actually hand over the house. He couldn't actually hand
over the house. You're right about that. This is a
sticky part of Biltmore's history. Uh, he owns the home
and he's been petitioning the government for several years for

(35:31):
a little bit of help with that sticky inheritance tax
issue because it's going to be a huge burden on
his children when one day they inherit the home. So
we don't know what will happen if the built More
will become a federal state historical site or kids will
try to keep it in the family. And to that end,
the family has been really proactive about branding the home.

(35:54):
These days, you can buy built More wine, built More
brand towels, cookbooks, food, wood, ornaments. Even outside the on
site retail shops, you can get build More branded things.
So there's a ton of money in this home and
then the reputation that it has, and we can see
in the years since Cecil has stepped down and let
Bill manage the home, a couple of non Cecil things

(36:18):
have been implemented, and there's a petting zoo, there are
a couple of period costumes now and it's become more
of a recreational destination. You can bicycle it Built More,
you can go fishing. Uh, you can even take tours
down the river on a little float. So yeah, it's
it's changed over the year. It's a different house than

(36:40):
what George envisioned, yet remarkably similar. For sure, I would
say more welcoming for the modern times. Definitely, it's nice
to have the A C and heat. I agree. I agree.
And if you've never visited Built More again, you should go. Well.
I think that about wraps it up for our discussion
on build More. But if you've ever visited and you

(37:00):
have favorite rooms or stories to tell us about, please
email us at history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also find us on Facebook or on Twitter
at mist in history. And we have an article about
some other pretty interesting historical homes. Ten most expensive Houses.
I don't know what does it have built More on it.

(37:21):
I'm not sure. I don't think built were me the list.
It's again in its own category entyroom definitely, but still
you should check it out. There's a lot of interesting
and very expensive homes. You can find it by searching
for ten most Expensive Homes on our home page at
www dot house stuff works dot com. For more on

(37:42):
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