Tuesday, October 20, 2020
While we were in Asheville (which is a beautiful and obviously prosperous city), my wife compelled me to spend a day with her at the Biltmore Estate. (Nothing wrong with touring the estate, of course; just not exactly my thing.) The main residence and tourist attraction on the property is the Biltmore House, an historic house museum built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895. It is said to be the largest privately owned house in the United States, and is more than 178,000 square feet, with more than 135,000 square feet of living space. It is, of course, rich with amenities like bowling alleys, a fitness center, billiard room, and a 70,000-gallon heated indoor swimming pool. There are a lot of buildings on the estate, even setting aside Antler Hill Village. The village contains restaurants, rental cottages, a post office, shops, a doctor’s office, a school, and a church. There is also a full-size and quite luxurious hotel, a winery, and bass fishing lake on the 8,000-acre estate. And to use a recent motion picture title, “a river runs through it.” In this case it is the French Broad River. There are guided and unguided tours of the Biltmore House as well as other features of the estate available. We took advantage of one of the restaurants and ate a scrumptious breakfast at one of the restaurants in Antler Hill Village, and meandered through the shops there. Then we walked around the demonstration farm area, looking over the vintage farm equipment, watching a documentary about the estate, and chatting with a genuinely nice man who hand-manufactures straw brooms there and sells them in the gift shop.
In the afternoon, we toured the Biltmore House itself, and of course – took photos. There is also a large garden on the property, and had we understood its location and composition better – we’d have made time for that too. Even without looking over the gardens, though, the estate is a full-day kind of activity.
