Biltmore: The Caretakers
I have a confession to make.
Until last Christmas, I had never been to Biltmore Estate. It looms large in the Blue Ridge Country cultural and historical landscape, this grand home on 8,000 acres of land. I’d heard and read everything saying it is beautiful and enormous and awe-inspiring, but I’m not sure I really believed it.
It is. There’s no exaggeration when it comes to the Biltmore. The long winding drive past meadow and river, winery, woods and hillsides – the great glass conservatory that seems to grow out of the gardens – the house itself, endless and grand, the late 19th century residence of George and Edith Vanderbilt, the realization of a vision held by two architects and a young, wealthy heir.
What I also didn’t know was the long reach of that vision, its significance today. By the end of two visits, one in winter and one in summer, walks through the house and grounds (including one private tour ably led by guide Garrett LaBoda) and a series of long interviews with those charged with the legacy today, I felt like I was breathing history – the history of Vanderbilt, the history of trees.
The Landscape
Bill Alexander, landscape and forest historian, has been at the Biltmore Estate for 29 years, first as a horticulturist, then supervising the ornamental gardens, then managing the entire estate’s landscape, day-to-day. His office is now in what used to be servants’ quarters, above what used to be the Biltmore stables, now gift shops and a restaurant.
He’s just published a book on the Biltmore’s nurseries, and as much as it’s a book about the plants at Biltmore, it’s a book about Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect Vanderbilt hired to design the estate’s thousands of acres.
“I think what he really saw at Biltmore, because he was in his 60s at the time,” says Alexander, “he knew that this was going to be his last great project.”
Olmsted was the same man behind New York’s Central and Prospect parks, the capitol ground in Washington, D.C., various college campuses and one of the forces that led to the creation of Yosemite National Park.
“A lot of folks come here and say, ‘Oh, Olmsted. Yeah, he designed the gardens, didn’t he?’ Well, yes, but the gardens are only a tiny little bit of what he really designed. The broader landscape – that’s what he was looking at, the whole picture.”
When Vanderbilt started purchasing the estate, parcel by parcel, the land was over farmed and logged, its remaining trees scraggly, its hillsides cut with gullies. Olmsted had seen the same sort of devastation wrought elsewhere in the country, and he firmly believed that reforestation could redeem the land. He’d tried to convince others, including Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, to put modern forestry into practice, to reinvigorate near-ruined land and to develop the careful cultivation of trees, without success. In George Vanderbilt, and the Biltmore’s at-one-time 125,000 acres, he found an opportunity.
“He saw in young George Vanderbilt, who was in his mid-20s at the time, a very enthusiastic person who really didn’t have a clear idea of what he wanted to do with his land,” says Alexander. “He knew that Vanderbilt didn’t really have a profession, so this kind of added to his thoughts on suggesting that forestry would be a good occupation for him.”
The proposal: “Show the country how forestry can benefit the land and landowner at the same time.”
The vision came into being. The land closest to the house became home to formal gardens, a conservatory, an arboretum, water elements. A deer park, less thickly forested. Some of the grounds devoted to working farm. Many, many acres devoted to forest land, what Olmsted saw as a “living museum of trees,” carefully cultivated, planted and culled. That land which eventually became the core of Pisgah National Forest after George’s death. Olmsted’s influence resulted in the creation of the country’s first school of forestry, now remembered in the Cradle of Forestry in Brevard.
“He wasn’t thinking for the now,” says Alexander. “He knew that it would take literally a century or two for the forest to become mature and begin that healing process.”
Alexander says he ends most days by walking around some part of the grounds. What would he ask Olmsted, if he met him on one of those walks?
“Often I ask him things, in my own mind. What were you thinking here? How could you have envisioned this?
“How could he think in terms of the future like that? He knew what he was doing was not temporary, that it was to be enduring. I would just ask him how I could do more like that. How we all could, because he was such a visionary.”
The Traditions
“I went to the University of Tennessee with every intention of working here,” says Cathy Barnhart. She was first hired as greenhouse manager. She’s been here for 30 years now and her official title is floral displays manager.
“At the time I came to work here, Christmas was very new,” she says. “One of the first things the house manager said to me was, ‘Do Christmas.’”
These days, Christmas means, by the numbers, at least: 41 decorated trees in the house, 58 trees elsewhere on the estate; more than 1,500 poinsettias; around 550 wreaths; more than 10,000 feet of garlands; 1,000 ribbons and bows; 25,000 lights; 125 candles; 12,000 ornaments.
When it’s not Christmas, there’s the constant arranging and rearranging of 30 floral displays throughout the house, there’s the festival of flowers in the spring and summer, and… well, there’s Christmas. In February, poinsettias are ordered. In May, the schedule’s set. “By July, the crew is working on Christmas.”
“We are not trying to interpret the period,” says Barnhardt, “but we are trying to take inspiration from the period.” Each year there’s a theme: one year it was Christmas carols, one year it was “the holly and the ivy,” one year it was fairy tales. In 2007, it’s the arts.
She’s always learning, she says, even to the point of reading period novels – “I pick up information wherever I can get it.”
The grandest room of all at Christmas is probably the banquet hall, where the giant tree is raised every year, twice (once in November, and replaced in December).
“We know that it had electric lights on it, we know that wrapped packages hung on the tree, we know that the Vanderbilts handed out oranges from baskets under the tree.”
They carry on that tradition today, with a party and gifts every year for the employees.
Barnhardt’s work, in a way, merges the outdoors with the indoors, the landscape architect’s vision with the building architect’s.
“We are not really a Victorian property,” she says. The Biltmore, like its grounds, is less formal in philosophy than it is organic. “We want to bring that garden feeling more inside Biltmore Estate.” As for Barnhardt’s own home, is it Biltmore-inspired?
“I put my tree up last night. It’s much, much simpler.”
The House
Rick Conard, as director of engineering services, is intimately involved with the physics of bringing in the banquet hall’s giant tree every year. They bring it in bound, he says, and pull it up by ropes.
“It’s a very scary thing to see it go up between a chandelier and a tapestry that’s a few hundred years old,” he says. It’s a midnight job, done while there are no tours, and so far there’ve been no mishaps getting the tree up, he says, though “we once had a small accident with the tree coming down.” It broke a piece off a chair molding.
Two decades ago, Conard started at the Biltmore as an electrician and worked his way up. Today, he manages the inner workings of the building – housekeeping, maintenance, carpets, plumbing, electrical, the alarm system, event setup and the “big” decorating.
“We live in a changing environment,” he says. “We can plan and plan and plan [but we’re] working in an old building and things can break.”
Richard Morris Hunt, the architect of Biltmore, like Olmsted was a legend in his time. He studied in Paris and worked in New York, designing such buildings as The Breakers in Rhode Island, and other commissions for the Vanderbilt family.
Asked what he feels like was Hunt’s most brilliant element in the house is, Conard gives an unexpectedly prosaic answer: “For me, personally, it’s the electrical system.
“It’s a two-wire system, it’s insulated, it’s a very safe system. And the system is still in operation today.
Conard still finds ghosts from the past here, traces left, such as a lantern hung inside an attic wall, left during construction. “When I first came here, you could walk in the bachelor’s suite, you could smell the tobacco – it was very, very faint.”
The Vanderbilts
Less than half of Vanderbilt’s books are in the grand library downstairs. Many of them are here, in Section 6, along with blueprints and documents, stored and protected, researched, catalogued, or in the process of being so.
Section 6 was the bachelor’s quarters in George’s day. Suzanne Durham, special collections manager at the time of our interview (she recently left the Biltmore to become head of special collections at the University of West Georgia), works among old books and letters and papers –we walk past shelves stacked with beautiful old bindings. The spines suggest George’s wide interests: reading Faust, Wild’s Foreign Cathedrals, Westminister Abbey, a history of Versailles, a book on historic monuments.
“The majority of these books are not considered rare – you can find them in research libraries,” says Durham. But there are “some very, very ancient books” stored away even more carefully. When I ask what some of them are, she can’t tell me – and they won’t publish a list. There was a theft some years ago, and most were recovered, she says, but the risk is too great.
She’s gotten to know the history of the estate well through the documents left behind, but when it comes to George and Edith, “it’s always this black hole.
“We don’t know what happened to them – we think there used to be more,” she says. “We’re hoping it’s extended family that took things. It’s all rumor, nothing’s known for sure.”
For years, there was no security system in the house. Visitors would sit on the furniture; staff would borrow items from the house.
“People will tell you they came to visit the Biltmore in the 1950s, ’60s, and it was shabby.”
Expensive restoration work throughout the house continues to bring the estate back to its former glory (e.g. one bedroom alone has cost $….. to restore).
Until more is discovered, Durham and other historians work with what they have, learning about and developing their own insights into the people who were here before.
“We all have our theories about George,” she says, and she’s fond of him. He was “lonely – he wanted his friends around him. He was very bookish. He’s kind of a touching character in a way.”
Durham herself feels closest not to the Vanderbilts, but to the people who worked for them.
“The connection I feel is as an employee,” she says. “There’s so much information on all the people who worked here – I’m one of those people, and my records will be here someday.
“When we walk up the stairs and make jokes about the servant’s entrance, well, that’s me, in a sense.”
This story originally appeared in Blue Ridge Country and is reprinted with permission of the author and Leisure Publishing Co.
Copyright © Leisure Publishing Co.
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