Now the mother of a healthy one-year-old daughter, Edith turned her attentions more fully to those beyond her gates. She was already becoming known and admired within the village and surrounding areas for her kindness, approachability and, like her husband, charitable acts. Edith would ride out on horseback to deliver baskets—of food, blankets, and other necessities—to pregnant workers, the sick, or those needing clothing or coats. Together George and Edith had worked to expand the parish school in the village, and Edith wanted to establish additional educational programs for the children of the workers on the estate. Edith arranged for a “school bus”—an outfitted wagon—to transport the children of dairy farmers living on the estate to school. She set up a sewing school in the Horse Barn. Both serendipity and determination helped Edith put another of her charitable social reforms into action.
Neighborhood children were likely among the first to spot the pair of artisans, two newly arrived women working diligently in their house in the village of Biltmore. The youngsters could see the women on their porch or through the windows facing the street, creating new and useful things from the bounty of the woods.
It did not take long for Charlotte Yale and Eleanor Vance to notice the tykes, eyes fixed, curiosity written in the furrows of their young brows. The women invited the youngsters in and showed them around. What started as a friendly invitation soon grew into a full-blown apprenticeship for the local children.
Come on in, was Vance’s message. Eleanor Vance hailed from Ohio and was a graduate of the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where she studied with carver William Fry. A skilled artisan in her own right, she had studied in England with Thomas Kendall, restorer and carver to the royal family. Charlotte Yale was from Connecticut and knew her way around clay. Both women were adept at a variety of crafts, weaving and needlepoint among them. The pair had met while studying at Chicago’s Moody Bible College. In that city, Vance and Yale felt the call of a powerful voice rising out of the postindustrial fray, one urging others to a life of service. That voice belonged to Jane Addams, cofounder, along with Ellen Gates Starr, of Hull-House in Chicago. When it opened in 1889, Hull-House became one of North America’s first settlement homes, serving the poor by offering programs and education. Within two years, the settlement home hosted two thousand people a week. Hull House was also the home of The Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, founded there in 1897. Vance and Yale embraced Addams’s call to service, befriended the social reformer, and were inspired to serve abroad as missionaries. However, Eleanor Vance’s mother had been ill. The women brought her South, like so many others, to seek the recuperative powers of Asheville’s mountain air and to see how they might put their skills to good use.
The settlement house approach, a burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement which popularized traditional craftsmanship, and Vance and Yale’s arrival in Asheville all combined in happy coincidence. Though Asheville was meant to be only a brief, healing sojourn, the friends found a need for their skills there, and the vacation became their vocation. They would soon find they had something in common with one of the most well-known women in town.
Standing at the kitchen table which she used as a workbench, Vance initially began showing small groups of boys the techniques she had learned over the years. Word reached the ears of Reverend Swope. Shortly thereafter, in the fall of 1901, he helped the women establish what would become known as the Boys Club of Biltmore Parish. At 5 Oak Street in the village of Biltmore, the casual kitchen-table instruction took on a more formal feel as a small group of eager young boys began to learn a trade. The club had guidelines, including a constitution which stated that anyone participating had to be “of good moral character,” and should “try to maintain the purity, kindliness, courtesy and mutual helpfulness that should prevail in a company of Christian boys.” There was no smoking, no drinking, no cursing, and no chewing of one of North Carolina’s biggest exports—tobacco.
Southern Appalachian traditions and artisanal pastimes—rivercane weaving, ceramics, wood carvings—were as much a part of the fabric of this culture as the clay was of the soil. Vance and Yale knew that they could build on the existing craft culture present in the mountains and show citizens that these skills could provide a living. There was, after all, not only talent, but need. The women wanted to harness that talent to alleviate that need. Vance and Yale began training the young people living in and around the estate and village, teaching them skills that might make it easier to put food on their tables, fires under their kettles.
Similar artisanal movements were taking root across the country. Elbert Hubbard, founder of the Roycroft Arts and Crafts community in East Aurora, New York, was a soap salesman who had met English writer, designer, and social activist William Morris while abroad on a walking tour of England. Hubbard soon evolved from Arts and Crafts acolyte into torchbearer. Hubbard published his own writings, and established the Roycroft Press to bring his personal philosophy to the public. His books and pamphlets sold by the millions and the press evolved into bookbinding, leather crafting, metalwork, and wood carving. When fans began coming to East Aurora to catch a glimpse of publisher Hubbard, an inn was built to accommodate them. The artisans who worked to furnish the Roycroft Inn became known as Roycrofters. The growing community espoused a creative ideology that emphasized style and expression, self-sufficiency and service. Theirs was a strong departure from the industrial age that had made tens of millions for the wealthiest families of the era.
“East Aurora,” Hubbard’s magazine Fra expressed, “is not a locality. East Aurora is a condition of mind.”
The work Vance and Yale had begun in the community struck a chord with the down-to-earth Edith. By Christmas in 1901, the Boys Club was up and running, and in early 1902, Vance and Yale’s young carving apprentices presented Edith with a bookrack as a thank you for her patronage. Edith thanked them in return by commissioning yet more work. Those who performed best were invited to Biltmore House to see some of the elaborate carvings there by Karl Bitter and others. Edith soon approached Vance and Yale about running a school for the community. Could they use some more formal support? Might she be able to assist them in expanding their small enterprise, to reach a greater number of children? Vance and Yale agreed. Reverend Swope had initially paid them each $970.83 per year. Edith arranged for additional financial subsidies, donated a large space in the village for the group, and within a few years a Girls Club was added. These programs would, by 1905, become officially known as Biltmore Estate Industries.
But Edith had yet more education in mind. In the fall of 1901, Edith had established the Biltmore School of Domestic Science for Colored Girls. The new institution was on Biltmore Road, just past All Souls Crescent. Enrollees had to be at least sixteen years old, and be interested in learning everything they needed to know to work in any area of housekeeping or service. Instruction was soon headed up by principal Mary Isabella McNear. The “classrooms” included a bedroom, dining room, kitchen, and laundry facility. The students could take courses in food preparation, housework, and laundering techniques, and would graduate with the kinds of skills that would enable them to find work in both private homes and businesses. The one requirement was that applicants needed to be able to both read and write, which limited the number of individuals eligible to apply.
Some young women walked up to two miles from their homes for the opportunity to gain the skills needed to land work as maids, cooks, housekeepers, or waitresses. Students wore a uniform of a long full frock, with a blue and white gingham apron. A white collared necktie framed their necks; their hair was gathered and worn up, topped with a small cap matching their aprons. They learned to mend their own clothes, and how to prepare elegant meals as well as basic fare. George wasn’t the only man in town with a private train car, and sometimes chefs from other locomotive kitchens—such as Dr. Seward Webb’s Elsmere—visited the school to give talks and demonstrations.
There were many more applicants than there were spots available. The only tuition required was 10 cents per week. Students could purchase cookbooks below cost and in installments, if necessary. The school used as its guide Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking, a favorite among home science schools.
On commencement day, diplomas and certificates were distributed, and Reverend Swope and Miss McNear addressed the graduates. Graduates created a society of houseworkers, a kind of support group for individuals in their line of work. Students also put their skills on display, serving supper at Edith’s bazaar in the village to more than two hundred ticketed guests. They cooked a dinner for members of Asheville’s black community, and in the process raised money for their orphanage.
Classes at both new establishments grew and garnered attention and praise beyond the estate itself. New classes in sewing, basketry, and weaving were eventually added to Vance and Yale’s village school, and the students’ work was displayed at the 1902 parish school year-end ceremony. The School of Domestic Science, too, had successes to share. One young graduate, Miss Annie Mae Nipson, did so well at her studies that after graduation she was hired to work in the largest house in America: Biltmore.
• • •
Late in the morning of May 8, 1902, Paul Leicester Ford was sitting at his desk in the second-floor library of his home at 37 East Seventy-Seventh Street in New York City. He had spent most of the morning working on a new book. His personal secretary, Miss Elizabeth Hall, sat at a nearby desk, immersed in her own administrative tasks. It was a large room, commensurate with both Paul’s success and his vast collection of books, and stretched along the back of the four-story, Italian Renaissance town house.
When Ford’s brother Malcolm arrived, he came straight to the study. Paul’s secretary noticed Malcolm’s entrance, but wasn’t surprised to see him. He had appeared here many times before during the several years that she had worked for Ford. The low tone that the brothers employed was familiar enough to her ears. There had been ongoing tensions between the siblings. He’s probably here to talk about money again, she thought. It was not her business. Elizabeth kept to her work.
Then she heard it. A shot. Her ears ringing, she turned to see her employer, Ford, hunched over in his chair.
Stunned, Elizabeth now saw Malcolm moving toward her. Terrified, she bolted from the room and stood in the hall. Her composure returning, she thought to go back inside. She could have sworn she heard a voice. Could it have been Paul’s? Was he still alive? She listened. No, it was Malcolm’s voice. She steeled herself and entered the room again.
Malcolm had moved closer to the doorway and stood facing her, still gripping the new Smith & Wesson .38 caliber, hammerless pistol. Elizabeth froze.
“Now,” Malcolm said to Elizabeth, “watch me kill myself.”
Malcolm placed the muzzle of the .38 against his chest and pulled the trigger. He fell to the floor, landing just feet away from his barely living brother. The sounds of the gunshots had carried down the stairs. The butler and maids now bounded upstairs to find the grisly scene, Elizabeth in the midst of it.
A frenetic parade of grief and panic followed. It was midday during the working week. The cries of those inside carried out the windows that May day and onto busy streets. Doctors soon arrived as well as the authorities, among them the New York Police Department’s Captain Brown. By the time the family doctor, Dr. Emanuel Baruch, arrived, Malcolm was already dead. The scorched fabric on Malcolm’s shirt attested to the entry of the fatal bullet. There were powder burns on his hand and body. Ford lay on the couch in the library, scarcely alive. Dr. Baruch summoned another physician, Dr. Julius Rosenberg, who lived nearby. Ford struggled to speak. He seemed aware of the people gathered around him, but was fighting to form words. There was little the doctors could do: Ford appeared to have been struck through the heart. Dr. Baruch felt certain he’d suffered massive damage to his arteries.
“How am I now, doctor?” Paul uttered. “How am I now?”
The doctors moved Paul upstairs to the third floor and worked to make him as comfortable as possible. Another twenty to thirty minutes passed, then the thirty-seven-year-old Ford finally succumbed. Before dying, Ford looked up at Dr. Baruch and spoke once more, one final time. He had forgiven his brother, and he hoped that others would do the same. Eventually Malcolm’s body was also moved upstairs. The brothers lay at opposite ends of Ford’s house, quieter and closer than they had been in some time.
The doctors immediately turned their attention to Ford’s wife, Grace. Not yet married two years, Grace was nearly eight months into her pregnancy with the couple’s first child. Dr. Baruch did everything he could to keep Grace away from her husband, concerned not only for Grace’s health but that of the unborn child. She begged to look upon her husband once more. The doctors did not want to allow it, but had a difficult time preventing her from doing so.
The coroner arrived and it was not long before the newsboys took to the streets, their singsong calls rising up to the windows of Ford’s home where his wife lay under medical care, widowed, pregnant, and in shock. That night, a Dr. Munroe came by to stay with Grace. Carriages came and went bearing grieving friends and concerned loved ones.
Reporters clamored for details about the circumstances surrounding the fratricide-suicide. Police captain Brown, who was already familiar with the tensions between the two brothers, told reporters, “The cause for Malcolm Ford’s action can be explained by inference.” It must have been a moment of temporary insanity, many believed. The gun Malcolm carried was discovered to have been newly purchased and used just this once.
Those who knew the men best would remember two very different brothers. The literary genius and the athlete. The able-bodied and the physically challenged.
Malcolm’s amateur athletic achievements were well known. He was a member of the Manhattan Athletic Club and captain of the Brooklyn Athletic Association, and had begun competing in sports while still a student at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. He shone in track and field and had been a world record holder in the standing long jump. He had notched championships not only in the United States, but in Canada, as well. Broad jumps, high jumps, dashes and quarter miles were among his ribbon-earning specialties. However, the boys’ father, Gordon Ford, was said to have looked askance on his son’s dedication to sport. The elder Ford’s love was books, a love he passed on to his other children and especially to Paul, whose physical challenges made staying in his father’s massive library all the more attractive.
Tensions grew between Gordon and Malcolm Ford, and the senior Ford eventually disinherited him, leaving his property and the bulk of his fortune to Paul, his other brother, Worthington, and their four sisters. When the elder Ford died, he left behind an estate estimated to be in the neighborhood of $2 million. His autograph collection alone was estimated to be worth nearly $100,000. Malcolm received none of it and had turned to litigation, claiming that his father’s will was supposed to have been changed but never was. Malcolm asserted that he and his father had reconciled once Gordon Ford had contracted typhoid fever. The resulting illness, Malcolm insisted, had changed things between the estranged father and son. However, the will had remained unchanged. Malcolm sued his siblings for what he believed to be his rightful share, to no avail.
With his days of record-setting athletic achievements behind him and no family money to rely on, Malcolm needed to earn a living. His latest venture, the New Centaur, a magazine aimed at the sporting world that Malcolm knew so well, failed to find an audience. Paul Leicester Ford, on the other hand, had been at work on yet another book. In the wake of the success of Janice Meredith, his novel set during the American Revolution, Ford had been fielding lucrative writing requests from outlets such as the Saturday Evening Post, and was anticipating Janice Meredith’s adaptation for the stage. Additionally, invitations continued to arrive from wealthy friends such as George Vanderbilt, and telegrams landed on his desk sent by President Theodore Roosevelt. His wife, Grace, was tall, lithe, and considered by many one of the more beautiful young women to come out of Brooklyn in some time. Paul Leicester Ford was a man at the top of his game.
The disinheritance had strained relationships among all the Ford siblings. Unable to cobble together a meaningful and secure living outside athletics, Malcolm had begun routinely asking his younger brother for financial assistance. At a time when one’s quality of life, stature, and role in society were so closely tied to not only money, but family money in particular, Malcolm’s entire sense of self must have felt drastically compromised. Cosseted by luxury and comfort from birth, Malcolm had little experience in creating prosperity on his own once that flow of financial support dried up. In a lengthy letter to the editor of the New York Herald, Malcolm’s ex-wife wrote, “I think, as do his family, my husband was really temporarily insane when he committed the deed. . . . He certainly felt himself unjustly treated and had brooded over this for so many years that I think at last it unbalanced his mind.” She continued for several paragraphs, noting that her husband “was a fatalist, and he had been known to remark that it took more courage to live than to die.”
Two days later, the funeral was held in that same library, the two brothers reposed in black caskets. Grace sat near her husband’s coffin, among a small group of family and friends. The five remaining Ford siblings—brother Worthington, and sisters Mabel, Emily, Kathleen, and Rosalie—stood by mourning two of their own. It was a small affair, though outside the home a crowd waited for the caskets to be brought out. The bodies of the brothers were taken to Grand Central Station, where they were loaded onto a northbound train. Paul and Malcolm were laid alongside their father, Gordon, and their mother, Emily, in the family lot of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Tarrytown, New York. Orchids, white lilacs, and white roses adorned Paul Leicester Ford’s grave.
Grace’s health rebounded and she gave birth to a healthy baby girl, Lesta. In the days and weeks that followed Ford’s death, the papers detailed his career and associations. The clear consensus was that the writer and scholar had not yet come close to reaching the zenith of his abilities.
Remembrances of a different sort were arranged farther south at Biltmore, where Ford had spent so much time visiting with George and Edith. Schenck, too, remembered Paul Leicester Ford’s visits very clearly. “I would rank him among the most bewitching gentleman whom I have ever met,” Schenck wrote, “with his flashing wit, keen observation, and world-wide education.”
How must the dedication of Janice Meredith have felt after such a violent loss. That fabric, that filament to which Ford eloquently referred, had been severed. Now, there would be yet another dedication at All Souls, another service to grieve a loss and celebrate a life. Richard Morris Hunt’s simple Greek cross design, reminiscent of so many grander places of worship—St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome among them—lent an air of peaceful solemnity to the church he helped George build. Its east transept would now house a scene to commemorate Paul Leicester Ford’s life.
The window was again designed by Helen Maitland Armstrong and crafted by her father, Maitland Armstrong. Florence-born Helen looked to one of Italy’s most celebrated painters for inspiration, and based her window on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ. Where many of the windows in All Souls would depict biblical persons, or moments from the Good Book that perhaps spoke to the individual being honored, this window was different. This window shows pain and loss, sadness and grief, as Jesus’s mother, Mary, and followers including Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea, take Christ down from the cross and lower him into his tomb.
Caravaggio, the master of chiaroscuro, was an artist who could capture much beauty in the midst of terrific agony and pain. In his painting, his tenebroso effect draws the eye toward the subject with little background other than darkness to speak of. But Helen’s glass interpretation was about light, light shining through her creation as the sun rose in the east, illuminating the memory of George’s dear friend.
Paul Leicester Ford would forever be linked with Biltmore. The words he so lovingly shared with the world about how the place had inspired him would live on after him. George, now without one of his dearest mates, could sit alone among his volumes and read that dedication, perhaps hoping to hear his friend’s voice again.
• • •
That summer finally brought happier times for George’s family and friends, Field in particular. But it had also been an emotionally grueling bit of time for the romantic thirty-two-year-old.
Earlier, in March, he had gone again to Biltmore, arriving from New York with Edith, George, their niece Lila, and others. He sat down in his room, took a few sheets of embossed house stationery, and wrote his favorite confidante—his mother. Ten days into the visit, he was in a state.
“Again at Biltmore,” he wrote his mother, “having the best time of my life and the worst time.”
Poor Field. He had agonized over every encounter, parsed every word uttered from Lila’s lips, read into her every gesture. Other guests came and went that March, including George’s sister Edith and her husband, the linguist Ernesto Fabbri. Field stayed. He had come to settle things once and for all. Each morning, he and Lila took out two horses for a ride around the estate. In the afternoons, they went shooting together. In the evenings, when the other guests repaired to the billiard room, Field and Lila sat in the tapestry room together. When Dr. Swope preached during the Sunday sermon at All Souls—“By patience ye shall win your soul”—Field felt sure Swope was speaking directly to him. (He also noticed titters of subdued laughter coming from the rest of the group sitting near him in the pews.) Field had Emily—George’s sister and Lila’s mother—on his side. Emily had written her daughter about Field and levied no objections to the man.
Edith and George were preparing to sail for Cherbourg, France, at the end of the month. Field knew the clock was ticking. Field had played a crucial role in Edith and George’s romance and, in turn, Biltmore had been a key factor in Field’s budding romance with Lila. Here he had played golf and hunted game with the sporting Lila. Here he had admired her skill with a horse, talked and walked with her over the grounds. And here, finally, he had won the heart of his dear friend George’s niece, after what seemed to the man an eternity of hoping against hope.
“I wish you were here to share, as I know you would, some of my more than happiness,” Field finally wrote to his mother who was staying at the Hotel d’Alba on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. “Lila, the little darling, has accepted me.”
Field could hardly believe it. “Straight through Lila has shown herself to be a woman and not a silly girl. I think she has satisfied herself that I am true and sincere,” he continued. “God help me to remain so.”
All smiled upon the union of William B. Osgood Field and Lila Vanderbilt Sloane. There was little snarking in the press about either party; instead articles celebrated Field’s friendship with George and touted his affability, the many stamps in his passport, and his collection of Japanese and Chinese curios. After graduating from Stevens Institute, he worked as an engineer and helped former classmates Otis Mygatt and M. W. Kellogg establish their own firms, the Holophane Glass Company and M.W. Kellogg Company, respectively. However, his role in the working world had diminished significantly since receiving a sizable inheritance from his expat aunt Kittie, who had died roughly a year earlier in Rome. As for Lila, the press called her “a good angel of the slums of New York,” who spent much time and money helping poor families on New York’s East Side. Of course the newspapers could not resist lingering over the fact that all of Lila’s lingerie was made in Paris.
The pair were married July 8, 1902, in Lenox, Massachusetts, at the Sloane country home Elm Court. Prior to the wedding day, armed guards stood watch over the accumulation of lavish gifts. In one day alone, six wagons full of presents for the couple arrived. After the ceremony and reception, newspapers reported that the newlyweds were “whisked off to a fairy land, otherwise known as Biltmore.”
• • •
The newlywed Fields stayed at River Cliff Cottage on the estate grounds, where George’s nieces Adele and Edith had stayed for their own honeymoons. While time spent at Biltmore was similar in many ways to a sojourn passed at a country estate abroad decades earlier, this estate south of Asheville was also very different.
Despite its setting in the wilds of western North Carolina, visitors to Biltmore felt as though they were stepping into a world where some of the oldest traditions of country life in both England and America prevailed. George’s vision—the working estate, the village nearby—had already become an inordinately expensive undertaking, but it evinced an anachronistic charm, as if it were not just a country home, but a kind of monumental denial that time was passing more rapidly than some would have liked to acknowledge. It was at once outsize and quaint, a French château in the land of the Blue Ridge, with the English baronial farms and working tenants and neighboring village. In appearance and practice, it was a vestige of eras past, where one could cling to a fleeting way of life.
Yet, even if the idea of Biltmore seemed frozen in a time that would soon melt away, the house itself was technologically quite advanced. To be at Biltmore was to straddle these two very different worlds.
Guests could still receive breakfast in the comfort of their own beds, but rather than ring a bell attached to a rope and pulley to alert a valet or a maid, they pushed an electric, ivory call button. Though battery-powered systems had come into favor in some homes, Biltmore’s system was elaborate and could be used to alert the maids, stables, or butler’s pantry from many locations, both public and private, throughout the entire house. In the event that a guest or family member might feel peckish, a snack was a button push away. Traditional afternoon tea might still be offered in the grandeur of the tapestry gallery, but snacks could be requested from servants day or night, and could be delivered by either an electric or hand-cranked dumbwaiter. Hot food rose from the basement kitchen pantry to the first-floor butler’s pantry and on to the second-floor hall near Edith’s room. The electric dumbwaiter boasted a capacity of 250 pounds. Flower arrangements, too, could rise from the bowels of the house, thanks to a hidden trapdoor in the floor of the Palm Court.
The house had a passenger elevator near the grand staircase at the home’s entrance, which featured oak paneling, ornate wrought-iron swirls over the glass windows, and brass lamps. A freight elevator at the north end of the house near the servants’ stairs hauled everything from guests’ steamer trunks to coal and firewood. These were installed by Otis Brothers & Co., which had also installed the elevators in the Eiffel Tower, Balmoral Castle, the Kremlin, and the Washington Monument. Hunt had been more than familiar with elevators, having designed the Tribune Building in New York which, in 1875, contained what is believed to be the first express elevator installed in a commercial office building. With Biltmore staff providing roughly one footman for every three guests, several changes of clothes per day for each, and eight to ten courses per meal, the elevators and dumbwaiters got a fair workout.
For recreation, those at Biltmore might still wish to visit the stable complex and set out for an afternoon of hunting on the estate. But if they so desired, they could also enjoy two lanes of indoor bowling or swim in the 70,000-gallon indoor pool—complete with underwater electrical lighting.
Heat was generated by boilers built by the John D. Clarke company out of New York. The boilers used both wood and coal, and the hot air headed up through pipes which, in turn, heated water to create steam. Shafts ran like spines through the entire house, from subbasement to the fourth floor, carrying steam-heated air. Natural convection and the laws of physics wafted it upward, and there it would find its way out of wall vents, warming the chilly noses and toes of visitors. Water was heated by a horizontal tubular return system. But the energy needs of the house were astounding. Roughly 25 tons of coal were burned in two weeks alone during the winter of 1900.
Entertaining scores of guests involved storing massive quantities of food, and Hunt wanted the refrigeration system to be able to handle any party that the Vanderbilts could throw. The ammonia gas, mechanical refrigeration system was capable of keeping up to 500 pounds of meats and vegetables and 50 gallons of liquid at a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit—the approximate temperature of modern refrigerators. Walking through the basement—should one venture down on the way to the gym or changing rooms—one found two walk-in coolers in the hallway. The main kitchen, butler’s pantry, and pastry kitchen all had refrigerators as well. There was also an ice-making plant. All these conveniences stood in marked contrast to life as it was lived by ordinary people of the time, who made do with regular deliveries of ice blocks from the local purveyor. Iceboxes would continue to be commonplace in many American homes well into the mid-twentieth century, and the first domestic refrigerator in the United States would not be marketed until 1913, when Fred Wolf introduced his Domelre (Domestic electric refrigerator).
With an estimated 2,388,828 “cubical feet” of space to serve, Biltmore House’s systems and amenities were on the scale of, and had more in common with, those at a large hotel rather than a typical American country home. The three kitchens and forty-three bathrooms, for starters, required a great deal of water at a time when having on-demand hot water and indoor plumbing was not a given for many, especially in the rural South. Hunt designed many of the lighting fixtures himself—including the “Crown of Light” chandelier in the banquet hall—and he made sure that the house would have enough electricity to power 180 electrical outlets, 288 fixtures, and other electrically powered items, such as the refrigeration units and internal call system.
The New York firm of Hatzel & Buehler were the masterminds behind the electrical wiring and call boxes throughout the house. John D. Hatzel and Joseph Buehler had worked at Thomas Edison’s first generating station. The debate between the alternating and direct currents raged on as George was constructing the house. Rather than choose between Edison’s direct current system and Westinghouse’s Tesla-designed alternating current system, George had both systems installed. The alternating current could actually be used to generate direct current, which could in turn be used to run not only the house itself, but also to power aspects of the village of Biltmore. The lower voltage of the stepped-down direct current made the swimming pool’s underwater lights a luxurious—and safe—possibility. Though alternating current would eventually win out nationwide, Edison’s trademark lightbulbs would continue to glow throughout the house.
The laundry complex was impressive, with washing “machines” that could spin and extract, all powered by overhead belts. Heated drying racks accommodated the family’s and guests’ numerous linens. The laundry alone had a separate electric system to warm its hot water.
So while all was peaceful precision and luxury above stairs, the churning subbasement made Biltmore House hum. Over the years, changes and upgrades were made as they became necessary. As early as 1901, a rusting issue threatened the refrigeration system’s brine tank, through which the chilled ammonia gas–confining coils circulated. Workers eventually installed a gas generator with backup batteries. The magnificent electronics switchboard was a sight unto itself, six feet by seventeen feet of gleaming marble dripping with wiring.
The home’s timekeeping system, designed by Boston’s E. Howard & Co., relied on technology indispensable to train stations across the nation, the Vanderbilt railroad system among them. Wall clocks in the servants’ areas and elsewhere in the house were perfectly synchronized with an outdoor master clock that looked down over the stable complex. No matter where your station placed you on those grand estate grounds, time passed, each tick unrelenting.
• • •
Queen Victoria had died in 1901 at the age of eighty-one, bringing an official end to a near sixty-four-year reign and an era that bore her name. Edward VII succeeded her as king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of the British dominions, and as emperor of India. On American shores, though, a tarnish had already begun to settle on the Gilded Age. Those who had earned their wealth—the upstarts, those of much humbler beginnings, such as the Commodore—were two generations removed from those who now enjoyed it. Many wealthy scions lost the ability to earn. For those, it would soon be once again back to shirtsleeves.
The capacity of individuals to adjust to changing times increasingly defined their ability to succeed in life and commerce. Malcolm Ford could not. George’s challenges—financial, certainly, and perhaps others which stemmed from an exhaustion with the gargantuan estate—appeared to be increasing. As for Edith, her attentions were never far from the larger community surrounding her own, rarefied realm.
It would still take some time for the Gilded Age to fully yield to the Progressive Era, for the rage for Louis XV flourishes to fade away and be replaced by an appreciation of the simple elegance of the Arts and Crafts movement. The artificial would give way to the natural; that which was of the elite, would soon be of the people.
Edith strode deftly between these two worlds, one of Victorian elegance, the other of rugged mountain simplicity. She may have appeared to live a life of the elite, but to those beyond the iron gates of the estate, Edith quickly emerged as one who was decidedly of the people.