Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate: 6 Years to Build, 43 Bathrooms 🤩 Aerial America | Smithsonian Channel

During America's Gilded Age, Asheville was also a popular getaway spot for America's richest industrialists, including the Edisons, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts, some of whom built country homes here. One of them is the largest private house in the United States. The Biltmore Estate was constructed in the 1890s by 26-year-old George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the famous New York railroad tycoon. With virtually unlimited resources at his disposal, Vanderbilt's French Renaissance-style estate took more than six years to build. And with such a massive undertaking, it required its own brick-making factory and a private railway for delivering materials. The finished 250-room mansion has 34 bedrooms and 43 bathrooms. When it came to designing the Biltmore's grounds, George Vanderbilt hired the best of the best, Frederick Olmsted, the landscape architect who created New York's Central Park. Olmsted designed formal gardens close to the house, but he also regenerated forest areas around the estate by transplanting trees and encouraging new growth. It was one of the country's very first forest conservation projects. During the Great Depression, Asheville's tourist trade was in decline, so the Vanderbilt family agreed to open the Biltmore for public tours. Today, the estate is visited by more than a million people a year. While the Biltmore was under construction, George Vanderbilt began acquiring acreage around the property to use as a private hunting retreat. This is just one of the parcels he bought, Mount Pisgah. Logging here had cut wide gashes into the landscape. But Vanderbilt hired foresters to manage the land and bring this forest back to life. One of these, German-born Karl Schenk, went on to establish the Biltmore Forest School, the first of its kind in the United States. In 1914, the U.S. government bought 87,000 acres of this land from his estate and turned it into the Pisgah National Forest. It's best known as the home to Cold Mountain, the title of the best-selling Civil War novel written by Asheville native Charles Frazier, and later adapted into a film by Anthony Minghella.