If George’s finances had been adversely impacted by the Panic of 1907, that year’s Christmas celebration, one of the more elaborate in recent memory, gave a different impression. Fifty wagons full of holly, mistletoe, and other evergreens arrived at the house. There were three separate celebrations, the largest of which brought nearly a thousand people—employees, their families, and friends—from near and far, by horse, wagon, and foot.
The rafter-scraping tree towered more than 30 feet high in the banquet hall. Hanging from it were five hundred incandescent lights, and more presents than ornaments. The lights remained dim, however, until seven-year-old Cornelia stepped forth and flipped the switch to illuminate the festive arbor. She was her mother’s daughter, ever the approachable hostess. She cavorted with the other children and led them in games and dancing. George and Edith arranged for a brass band to play during the festivities and, following the home’s now well-established tradition, everyone received toys and clothing. The gifts were not limited to the younger attendees, and the needs, if not wants, of the adults on hand were given as much consideration as Edith and George distributed blankets, clothes, and other useful items to employees. Edith kept track each year of which children got what gifts so as not to duplicate a present. Fruits and nuts and hundreds of pounds of candy sweetened the affair, and George shook every hand.
Later in the day, Edith held a tea for choir members from All Souls, and a Christmas dinner was held that evening for family and friends. The family’s impact on the area was already undeniable, and the attraction of estate employment had resulted in a popular ditty sung by some of the local young boys:
When I grow up, if I don’t get kilt,
I wanna work for the Vanderbilts.
However, future festivities at the estate and elsewhere in town would likely be tamer—or at least more private—and not solely because of any belt-tightening. Asheville officially dried up in the fall of 1907, and the state of North Carolina followed suit in the spring of 1908. Asheville, not unlike other locales, had gotten a jump on Prohibition, and it would be the last Christmas for years that a citizen of that town could legally buy alcoholic beverages. The temperance movement had brought women and children to the streets, lawmakers to secluded hand-wringing sessions behind closed doors, taverns to their knees, and voters to the polls.
Places like the Eureka Saloon, opened at the corner of West College and Lexington in 1896 by A. G. Halyburton and now run by John O’Donnell, began to feel a sobering pinch. O’Donnell and other tavern keepers would have to find new ways to keep their customers—tombstone carver W. O. Wolfe, young Thomas Wolfe’s father, once counted among them—well lubricated. To that end, a series of tunnels were being burrowed in and under Asheville’s sloping fairways, allowing even the most well-heeled, illicit drinkers to venture from the lobbies of respectable hotels into the basements of boarded-up saloons without being spotted.
“Drop in and refresh yourself at the Eureka,” O’Donnell’s ads had read in more free-flowing days, inviting citizens to stop by his newly acquired establishment. In addition to beers like Schlitz and Dixie, O’Donnell carried a wide selection of whiskies including Old Barbee and J. R. Riper’s. O’Donnell also boasted that he was the sole agent in town for Green River Whiskey: “The kind without a headache.”
No more. A fresher, more irritating headache was here to stay for the foreseeable future.
• • •
From Schenck’s point of view, cash flow on the estate in general, and in his forestry department specifically, had been drying up to a mere trickle. He had had difficulty securing money for his payroll, and sometimes offered his own promissory notes to the bank in order to keep things functioning. Schenck had begun viewing George’s entire estate venture as a “rich man’s hobby” with “no grounding in economics.” He felt sure that the enterprise—from village to piggery, from forest deep to mountain high—was “destined to fail.”
With work on the estate at a standstill, Schenck began to feel his own role would soon meet an end. He decided to go to Germany and elsewhere in Europe to visit his mother, friends, and colleagues. He happily greeted his forestry students when he returned to Asheville, but the financial forecast remained cloudy as the school and associated lumber accounts were in the red. George had ordered horses to be sold and the grooms who cared for them to be dismissed. Schenck also noticed a change in George and Edith’s moods.
“George Vanderbilt was very nervous,” he later wrote, “and Mrs. Vanderbilt was in tears whenever I called on her.” Schenck also felt a change in George’s demeanor toward him. “I had the feeling that somebody, during my absence, had succeeded in undermining Vanderbilt’s confidence in me and, what was worse, in the outcome of his and my enterprise in forestry.”
Then came the day that George instructed Schenck to try to sell as much of Pisgah Forest as possible, leaving a scant several thousand acres or so around the house. George promised to pay Schenck the standard agent’s commission if he were successful in finding any buyers.
With his future at the estate growing ever more uncertain, that summer of 1908 Schenck nevertheless began preparations for a three-day forestry celebration the coming fall. He invited those who worked in, profited from, and preserved forest lands. “Rejoice with us,” his missive began. “On the 26th day of November next we shall celebrate the twentieth anniversary of forestry at Biltmore, together with the tenth anniversary of the Biltmore Forest School. Rejoice with us, and make our hearts glad by your welcome presence. . . .”
Meanwhile, Edith and George made arrangements for an extended European stay. American money went much further in places like Paris, where both Edith and George felt at home and could stay in their own apartment or with friends and family. The costs of running an estate as large as Biltmore were greatly reduced if no one were living there. Schenck and his rangers would continue to live frugally in the woods that George hoped to sell.
Schenck had one last favor to ask of Edith before she and George departed. Schenck had received a letter from the Greys of Canada: Governor General Earl Grey; his wife, Lady Alice Grey; and their daughter, Lady Sybil. They wrote saying that they hoped to stop by for a visit on their way north after a stay in Bermuda. Schenck could not imagine entertaining the family in the modest cottage he and his wife shared in the Pink Beds. Edith happily arranged for the visitors to stay in Biltmore House. Schenck entertained as well as he could. There was so much that the land and the surroundings had to offer that cost little more than an adventurous spirit and some sensible shoes. There were horseback rides and motorcar trips. Schenck took the earl hunting around the estate. All in all, it was a successful sojourn for the Canadian family. Shortly after, George and Edith closed up the house and took Cornelia, now almost eight years old, and headed North. From there, they would set sail for distant and affordably charming shores.
At home and abroad, 1908 developed into a turbulent one, professionally, personally, and legally. Several miles north of the now-empty estate, on Haywood Avenue in downtown Asheville, the new Catholic Church of St. Lawrence was almost done. Its creator, however, would not see it finished. Rafael Guastavino died that summer at his home in nearby Black Mountain, just a year prior to the completion of his masterpiece. He was fifty-five years old.
Guastavino had been suffering from diabetes, but a recent onset of a severe flu—deadly in those times—had proven too much for his strained health to handle, and a priest was summoned to perform the final Catholic sacrament of last rites. Those who had come to know and work for the transplanted Spaniard thought of him not solely as a renowned architect but also as a philanthropist. He gave freely of his talents, time, and money. The new church’s cost was carried to a great extent by Guastavino himself, who worked on the project exuberantly and without pay. When completed, the church’s copper-sheathed, sky-dominating dome, measuring 58 feet by 82 feet, became the largest freestanding elliptical dome in all of North America.
Guastavino left an architectural legacy of structures throughout America and his son, Rafael Jr., continued his father’s work. (In fact, the following year, 1909, Guastavino Jr. would complete the dome of New York’s St. John the Divine.) Guastavino-tiled arches soared above the heads of the rich and poor alike, whether in private homes or in public New York City subways. From Biltmore to Boston, from Grant’s Tomb to the soon-to-be-built Grand Central Terminal, the Guastavino touch was everywhere reflected in dome and tile, forever sealed in ceramic and mortar. An accomplished musician, Guastavino had been composing a special mass that he wanted performed at the opening of the new church. He did not finish the work, but when the high requiem mass was eventually celebrated at St. Lawrence, sections of that composition were sung in his honor. His collaborator Richard Sharp Smith served as a pallbearer. Guastavino’s body was placed temporarily in a vault at Riverside Cemetery while his church was finished. He was later interred in a crypt in a small chapel to the left of the altar. Those who worked with him knew that there were finishing touches and details that Guastavino intended to make but had never had the chance to execute. These ideas would now rest with him forever. Biltmore had lost another of its artistic masters.
On the legal front, George found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit pertaining to his lands. This time, the plaintiff was not a poacher, or a squatter, but rather a former employee. The gentleman in question had worked for the Biltmore and resided on the estate grounds. According to the ex-worker’s complaint, George had cheated him out of a land deal and the man was determined to get justice in one form or another. The most recent hearing, however, was to assess the former worker’s sanity. He had vociferously threatened that, if monetary reparations were not made, he would burn Biltmore to the ground.
Troubles in love and money continued to plague Edith’s brother, as well. Between 1903 and 1907, Natalie had advanced more than $67,000 to help her brother. Though his bankruptcy had been discharged in 1907, LeRoy was still struggling to regain his reputation in the business world. The press had taken a renewed interest in LeRoy’s personal life after his wife was found that summer living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Sioux Falls had long been a destination for those seeking a quick-ish—if not quickie—divorce. The town had become slangily known as a divorce colony and one could legally dissolve a marriage after a short, ninety-day residency there. Sioux Falls soon had hotels, restaurants, and a booming lovelorn business. One cluster of rental houses had been nicknamed “Divorce Row.” (As if to keep affairs in balance, there was a growing business in remarriages as well.)
To avoid notice during her stay, Emma used the name “Mrs. A. M. A. Stewart.” She had initially taken up residence in the Cataract Hotel, where a fellow lodger spotted Emma and revealed her true identity. While waiting out her residency, Emma had enrolled in a stenography course at the Sioux Falls Business College to brush up on her typing and shorthand. Once her identity had been made public, Emma was tracked down by a reporter from the New York Times who found her studiously reviewing her class notes. “I have made no secret of my being here, but I do resent being dragged into publicity on Mr. Dresser’s account,” she told the reporter, noting that she had successfully avoided contact with the papers during the height of LeRoy’s legal trials in New York City. “I lived with Mr. Dresser until a year and one-half ago, when he deserted me,” she said. She added that, “His [financial] failure occurred six years ago, which disproves the suspicion that I am separated from him because he lost his money.”
She wanted a skill, she explained, and hoped to be able to support herself and help care for her teenage children, Susan and Daniel Jr. Emma also proudly pointed out that since moving into a modest home on Sioux Falls’ Prairie Row, she had begun mowing her own lawn. This was a far cry from the life she and LeRoy had been living at their estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Since then, the pair had resided in a New York City apartment, and even spent a short period of time with Emma’s mother. It wasn’t long before the two went their separate ways and LeRoy took up residence at the New York Yacht Club.
The papers delighted in highlighting the divorces among the Vanderbilts; “The Vanderbilt Curse,” it was sometimes called. George’s brother Willie K. and his wife Alva—now Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont—had parted, and their daughter, Consuelo, was separated by this time from the Duke of Marlborough. George’s nephew Elliott Shepard had split with his wife. George’s nephew Alfred—Cornelius’s son—also went through a very public split in 1908. His wife, Elsie, had filed for divorce, accusing Alfred of an affair with Mary Agnes O’Brien Ruiz, the Cuban attaché’s wife. The alleged indiscretions took place aboard Alfred’s private train car, the Wayfarer.
There were, however, bright spots among these darker romantic pairings. George’s niece, Lila, was still happily married to Field and living in one of George’s now completed “Marble Twins” at 645 Fifth Avenue. Field and Lila divided their time between Manhattan; Lenox; Massachusetts; and Westfield, Field’s farm in Mohegan Lake, New York. Edith and George had now been together a respectable ten years, despite facing what seemed to be more upheaval each day. A bright spot was Cornelia. She continued growing, leggier and longer, looking more with each passing year as though she would inherit her mother’s stature . . . and, perhaps, her father’s restlessness.
• • •
“Statesman! Lumberman! Engineer! Forester! Come! And be welcome!”
Thanksgiving 1908 arrived. The Biltmore Forest School had been in operation for ten years, and Biltmore welcomed guests for a weekend of outings in and around the estate’s forests to celebrate the milestone. It had been more than twenty years since George had looked over these ravaged lands with the enchanting vistas and decided to put down some very large stakes. This first-ever American school of forestry was no longer alone in its educational mission but, as it operated solely on private lands, it remained unique. To commemorate this “tin” anniversary, Schenck hosted the Biltmore Forest Festival from November 26 through the twenty-eighth. “Do not don your best!” his invite warned.
Schenck took the lead for the weekend’s activities, ably helped by Reverend Swope, Chauncey Beadle from the nursery and landscaping, Dr. A. S. Wheeler from the agriculture department, and Charles Waddell, who ran the estate’s electrical section. Schenck, his students, and other estate employees guided visitors on a variety of excursions, during which Schenck described his views on “practical forestry.” Visits to Chauncey Beadle’s domain, the herbarium and nurseries, took place on Friday, and guests were also treated to a visit to the Biltmore Dairy, and other small farms. There were educational outings into the forests, showcasing new growths, including an impressive second growth for the well-performing yellow pine, some of which now dated to the estate’s initial clearing. Guests received economic as well as scientific context for the developments they witnessed. Newspaper correspondents wrote with gleeful fascination about how students become “cruisers,” stalking the forest and estimating marketable board feet along the way before chopping a single trunk. The modified, notched ax handle the student rangers used to assess measurements like merchantable height, diameter, or volume became known even beyond the estate as a “Biltmore Stick.” Educators, visitors, and lumbermen listened to Schenck describe how students learned which trees to cut, which to leave, how to lumber, and how to plant. On horseback and on foot, students covered miles, felling trees and harvesting tanbark, mapping acres, grading lumber, and preparing their choices for market.
Groups set off in carriages to inspect the new plantings of white and yellow pine, ash, oak, hemlock, maple, chestnut, walnut, and poplar, and to lunch beneath the newly expanding canopies of the forest plantations. It was like a carriage ride through time, studying the 1899 plantings of locust, cherry, sugar maple, and basswood, followed by a look at the progress of those planted in 1907 and 1908. There were sporting activities, featuring fishing and shooting contests. Finally, the adventurous and physically fit among the festival’s attendees embarked on a sunset hike to the lodge atop Mount Pisgah, which offered incomparable views from 5,700 feet above sea level, and a night sleeping beneath a glittering gathering of stars.
The festival was a great success which received national coverage. Still, Schenck must have wondered if it would be his last dance in the Pink Beds. Edith and George had to return sometime, and when they did, Schenck knew hard decisions were coming.
• • •
The following year, 1909, the inventor Wilbur Wright circled the Statue of Liberty in his airplane and Carl Schenck circled Chauncey Beadle in a fit of frustration and anger. Both events made the papers and captivated witnesses.
Passengers aboard the Lusitania, docked in the harbor of lower Manhattan, got quite the show from the deck of the massive ocean liner, its four sentry-like stacks standing at attention for Wright’s flyover. First launched in 1906, the Lusitania held the record for being the world’s largest ocean liner, but the White Star Line was planning two new ships which would best her: The Olympic, already under way in Belfast, and another, even more mammoth vessel, the construction of which had just begun and once completed would give new meaning to the popular term “floating city.”
Still in Paris in early 1909, George and Edith had hardly escaped the financial worries they had left in America. Buncombe County had telegrammed George to inform him that Biltmore was behind on its county taxes, and the county wanted at least half the amount due as soon as possible. The amount in question—$24,000—had been due in October, and expected by December. Now it was January. The county had been unable to pay teacher salaries in the first half of the month, a clear indication how much the area depended on George’s tax dollars. Legally speaking, the estate could be seized and sold, but it was unlikely to happen. “It is unjust to publish Mr. Vanderbilt as a delinquent,” a Greensboro paper pointed out, “when so many others are in the same boat.” Edith wrote Schenck about how popular her muskrat skins had been in Paris and asked Schenck for more. “The lagoon is full of muskrats,” Schenck had written Edith. He would be sure the trappers saved the best for her and thanked her for the “fine edition of Dickens” that Edith had mailed him. They planned a Dickens evening with the Wheelers upon George and Edith’s return. By spring, Cholly Knickerbocker’s “Society Gossip” column reported that George and Edith would be returning to Biltmore after the Easter holiday, and would stay through spring and early summer. A litany of challenges awaited the couple upon their return, among them one final conflict with Carl Schenck.
With such tremendous holdings, brimming with game of all kinds in its forests and riverbeds, the acreage surrounding George and Edith’s house were a tempting destination for hunters and gamesmen. The leasing of hunting and fishing rights was one way to offset costs at the estate. In March 1909, Schenck had done just that, leasing hunting and fishing rights on 80,000 acres of the Pisgah Forest to a consortium of men, with members from Asheville, Chicago, New York, and other locales, who comprised the Biltmore Rod and Gun Club. The group now looked forward to using those rods and guns to hunt on George’s land and pluck fish from his waters. There was a lodge available, game was plentiful, the streams hopped with mountain trout, and members would pay dearly to hunt there. The lease was for ten years at $5,000 each year. Schenck had made the deal, acting as the leasing agent and believing the action within his rights and responsibilities as chief forester. Schenck did not, however, mention it to George, who was not happy when he learned of the lease upon his return. He did not think Schenck had the right, no matter his position, to enter into any such agreement. He chastised Schenck and repudiated the lease.
The following month, in early April, another blow struck at the heart of the forest. Fires erupted at multiple locations throughout the lands near George and Edith’s house, spreading rapidly. Residents of the housing suburb that George had developed between Biltmore and Asheville, an enclave called Victoria, were also threatened. Residents there worked with firemen to try to keep the blaze at bay, and Schenck’s student rangers joined the firefighting effort. The fact that several fires appeared to begin at roughly the same time in more than one location on Vanderbilt properties raised suspicion. Witnesses reported seeing individuals fleeing the scene of newly erupting flames, which sprouted after the rangers and firemen had battled most of the blaze. The consensus was that the fires were set intentionally, and Schenck offered $100 to anyone who could help find the culprits. The fire consumed nearly 10,000 acres of land. Striving young poplars, notable among the reforestation efforts, were destroyed. Estimated market value losses varied, ranging from $250,000 to $300,000: Virgin timber reduced to ash. Years of reforesting work up in smoke. Armed guards now patrolled the remaining timber tracts.
Just a week later, another fire erupted, this one at the nearby Kenilworth Inn. When it was originally built, almost eighteen years before, George had been the principal stockholder in the venture. Again, Biltmore’s rangers sprung into action. Desperate guests, jumping from the windows of the burning hotel, landed in blankets held by the forestry students. The hotel faced estimated losses of $250,000 but was insured for only $72,500.
The fires stoked frustration and suspicion. Newspapers hinted that the flames were a result of the enmity of neighbors, but there was generous sympathy for George and Edith. The litigious ex-employee who had publicly threatened to burn Biltmore to the ground must have crossed many a mind.
By early June, newspapers broke the news that Chief Forester Schenck was leaving Biltmore. His resignation would go into effect November 1, 1909, even as the forestry program continued garnering praise. Less than two weeks after Schenck’s end date, newly elected president William Howard Taft lauded Biltmore’s efforts in a speech in the coastal city of Wilmington, North Carolina. “You have within the boundary of your state a gentleman named Vanderbilt who goes before everyone in the science of forestry,” the president told the crowd, “and I congratulate you on having that example, that thereby you may formulate laws which shall preserve to you the timber of your state.”
Before leaving, however, Schenck appeared in magistrate’s court to answer for yet another fracas that had resulted from the hunting and fishing lease: one involving estate superintendent Chauncey Beadle. Beadle had become one of the estate’s longest-running employees, and he and Schenck had had their ups and downs. They socialized—Beadle attended a stag dinner party hosted by Schenck—but when they disagreed about how the estate should be run, the arguments became heated. When Schenck turned up at Beadle’s office and allegedly threw the botanist to the floor and began pulling on his leg, Beadle filed charges. Judge Gudger in Asheville heard the case, and Schenck was fined $1.00 and “costs.”
Schenck spent the remainder of his time in Asheville keeping busy. When there weren’t blazes to attend to, the wily forester was evading US revenue officers who had learned of a whiskey still within view of Biltmore House. They asked Schenck to serve as a witness to the violation, but Schenck was not interested in cooperating. When a deputy marshal showed up at the estate to serve Schenck papers, Schenck scampered into the woods he knew so well. Eventually it was revealed that a novice moonshiner, T. C. Whitaker, had asked a more experienced local for help in distilling his hooch and, in turn, that “expert” had ratted Whitaker out to the revenuers.
Affairs between George and Schenck were settled, to a certain degree, roughly a year after Schenck left George’s employ. Schenck sued George for unpaid salary and overdue lumber accounts. The former employer and employee settled the two suits out of court with the total paid to Schenck reported between $12,000 and $15,000.
Schenck’s fourteen-year stay at the estate had been both innovative and memorable. He had searched the lands for radium for Thomas Edison—a friend of his cousin, pharmaceutical chemist George Merck—who was convinced the rocks in and around the estate might supply what he needed for his own experiments. Schenck had educated young men who would make fine foresters in both the private and public sectors. Schenck had enjoyed sleeping under the stars, whether escorting George, Edith, and their guests on camping trips to the Pink Beds or at the Buck Spring Lodge. He would remember the sight of pink rhododendron, and the voices of black construction workers singing “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” as the swing of their hammers created order from chaos, roads and safe passage in the midst of the ancient Appalachian undergrowth.
“This first breaking of virgin soil, it is true, came to a close in 1909,” Schenck later wrote. “But who will deny that, within the short span of its lifetime, the ground was effectively broken for private forestry to flourish in due course throughout America?”
After leaving Biltmore, Schenck approached Merck for funding contacts so that he could take his unique Biltmore Forest School on the road. Within four years, however, Schenck’s teaching adventures in America would come to an end. “Retrospectively, let me assert that the Biltmore Forest School died at the right time,” he wrote. “It died when it had reached the apex of its career. Be it man or tree or institution, it is better to die too early than too late.”
Shortly after Schenck left Biltmore, so, too, did Gifford Pinchot leave his job as chief of the US Forest Service. Pinchot had originated that post under President Theodore Roosevelt, with whom Pinchot shared a similar conservation vision and close relationship. Pinchot shared neither with Roosevelt’s successor, President William Howard Taft. When Department of the Interior agent Louis Glavis accused his boss and Taft appointee, Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger, of corrupt practices regarding claims on coal-rich lands in Alaska, Pinchot sided with Glavis. Things boiled over in late 1909 when the affair went public.
Pinchot wrote a letter to Congress, which Senator Jonathan Dolliver read on Pinchot’s behalf. There was “imminent danger that the Alaska coal fields still in government ownership might pass forever into private hands with little or no compensation to the public,” Pinchot wrote. He wanted these issues made public, “unless there are secrets which the people of the United States are not entitled to know concerning the source, nature, and progress of claims made for portions of the public lands.”
The Ballinger-Pinchot controversy resulted in Taft dismissing Pinchot for insubordination. The president wrote Pinchot in a January 7, 1910, letter: “By your conduct you have destroyed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate of the Government.”
In the eventual Senate investigation, Ballinger was cleared of wrongdoing, but his reputation did not emerge unscathed. Pinchot was out of a job and the conservation policies enacted by him and Roosevelt seemed at risk. The brouhaha and subsequent siding that followed the affair revealed the first fissure in what would become a massive rift within the Republicans, one that would carry into the presidential election of 1912 and lay the foundation for the formation of the Progressive Party.
Pinchot and Schenck, each passionate and knowledgeable in his own way, encountered difficulty fitting their views on forestry into the existing political and cultural landscape. For an important snapshot in time, however fleeting, they each had found their place at Biltmore, and benefited from the auspices of a family that was, whether or not purposefully, far ahead of the times. Pinchot and Schenck’s impact on American forestry would outlast any echoes of dissent and distrust.
• • •
With no forest school to subsidize in any way, George continued lightening his financial load and had recently sold off his herd of Berkshire hogs. Dr. Wheeler, the farm manager, explained to curious members of the media that George was no longer interested in raising the animals, many of which had been originally imported from England and Europe. A local farmer, William Cocke, bought all the hogs, around thirty in all. The entire piggery was moved to Cocke’s Blue Ridge Berkshire farm in Beaverdam, just outside the city. The animals’ lineage would continue to garner attention in future breedings and sales. One of George’s hogs, Loyal Lee, had been a prizewinner for Biltmore and had sired offspring which included the 617-pound bruiser Loyal Highclere. Though the hogs were award winners, they were not satisfactory income generators.
George soon sold the water rights from his Busbee Mountain supply to the village of South Biltmore, a growing area that had recently taken root across from the estate. He had also, just after the first of the year, sold all of his electric lines, associated equipment, and existing contracts to the Asheville Electric Company, making the firm the official owner of all the power lines on the estate which supplied not only the house, but also homes and businesses in the village and the Kenilworth Inn.
George and Edith did not seek to close the parish school which they had established in the village nearly twelve years earlier. However, the passage of school bonds and the formation of new nearby public schools made the school, in its current form, redundant. The building that once housed the school would be leased to another Asheville teacher who intended to operate a boys’ school in its place. This would also alleviate the $1,000 per year in taxes associated with the property. But this decision meant that the family would soon, however, need another place for Cornelia to complete her schooling. In addition to tutors and much educational travel, Cornelia had attended the parish school alongside the children of the estate workers and other community members.
George was not divesting himself of everything, however. He had purchased a Stoddard-Dayton automobile in 1907, which he had brought to a home he rented in Washington, DC. And when news spread in 1909 that George had purchased a Chalmers-Detroit touring car to use on the estate, the citizens of Asheville and Biltmore hoped the estate roads would now be open to motorists, something George had long forbidden.
And still, the Vanderbilts’ charitable giving and community involvement continued, despite the larger cutbacks. One day, an African American locomotive fireman, George Logan, spotted George’s private railcar, the Swannanoa, attached to the train he was working. Logan knew whose car it was. His family had sold their land to George years earlier. Now, however, he was having trouble making payments on his new home, and needed $500 to salvage his situation. Logan snatched a piece of scrap paper and pencil and quickly jotted down a note, which a sympathetic porter agreed to deliver to George. Soon after, Logan was instructed to go within the week to the Biltmore offices in the village, where he would find a check waiting.
Biltmore Estate Industries and the School of Domestic Science escaped the chopping block. Edith’s interaction with the community did not abate, and Biltmore Estate Industries—the weaving division, especially—was fast gaining national attention, if not large profits. Between 1906 and 1909 she and George had allotted more than $12,000 to the Industries. Sales during that time had grown from around $1,600 to a little over $6,000. White and blue counterpanes, a traditional favorite coverlet, were a popular offering, and sales were increasing. This simple yet quality work contrasted with grander designer fare of the moment available in boutiques. There one might find hats with brims a good three feet in diameter, covered in black and pearl-gray felts, and often festooned in Chantilly lace, bows, and plumage that would make even the proudest peacock seethe and flap in feathery envy. Though they may not have trafficked in such fanciful garb, Edith, Vance, and Yale’s efforts were successfully reestablishing handweaving’s place in the market.
“This summer,” one newspaper noted, “many fashionable women have surprised their friends by declaring that they preferred running a hand loom to playing bridge.”
• • •
Ten years into the new century, the planet Earth passed through the tail of Comet Halley, and the nation lost two very different but very capable chroniclers of its cultures’ haves and have-nots.
The man who had brought “The Gift of the Magi” to the world had come to Asheville just three years earlier, in 1907, to visit his childhood friend Sara Coleman. Greensboro-born William Sydney Porter—better known as O. Henry—headed West to the mountains where Coleman now lived and also wrote, often adopting the dialect of her home in the southern Appalachians. O. Henry, a former bank embezzler who had done time in the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, had become noted for his literary portrayals of the have-nots, the working classes. His tales of difficulty and despair made him popular and ran in stark contrast to the writings of society stalkers like Ward McAllister and Cholly Knickerbocker. While those columnists wrote of the Four Hundred, New York and Newport society’s most elite families, O. Henry penned a collection of stories—“The Gift of the Magi” among them—aptly titled The Four Million, a number he undoubtedly believed to be more reflective of the world in which he lived. In it, he detailed the experiences of a population with stories he felt worth telling, lives worth chronicling: from newsboys to showgirls, bums to butchers, secretaries to streetwalkers. After happening upon one of O. Henry’s short stories, Coleman had written him a letter inviting him to visit. He did, and they married that year. It was a late-life romance for both of them; he was forty-five, she was thirty-nine. Now, three years later, Mrs. Porter buried her husband in Riverside Cemetery, in the Asheville neighborhood of Montford.
O. Henry’s death came not quite two months after that of the man who had named the Gilded Age. On April 22, 1910, Mark Twain died, a copy of Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution lying nearby on his bed. “Give me my glasses,” the exhausted author had scribbled on a piece of paper for his caregivers. Then, after nearly seventy-five years on this earth, he left it. His birth had coincided with the passing of Comet Halley, and now his death was punctuated by Earth’s next encounter with that cosmological phenomenon. 1910’s appearance was a particularly close passing, and apocalyptic theories spewed like stardust across the globe, with French astronomer Camille Flammarion warning that the cyanogen gas in the comet’s tail would bring an end to all living things on planet Earth. Songs were written, voodoo comet cures were hawked, and one distraught prospector in San Bernardino, California, became so panicked by the idea of Earth passing though the comet’s tail that he nailed his feet and one hand to a cross, convinced the end of the world was nigh.
But Halley passed, humanity endured, and stars faded, Twain’s and O. Henry’s among them. Halley’s tail disappeared into the night sky, embarking on a seventy-six-year journey that would keep it at cosmic bay until its next earthly sighting.
By 1910, the number of boardinghouses in Asheville had exploded, from 55 in 1900 to 137. One of those newish boardinghouses was run by Thomas Wolfe’s mother, Julia Elizabeth Westall Wolfe, who had hung her welcome sign outside a house at 48 Spruce Street in 1906. Young Thomas spent much time there with his mother, observing the people who came and went in the rented rooms and breathing porches of the house known as Old Kentucky Home. In 1900, the year young Wolfe and Cornelia Vanderbilt were born, tuberculosis was one of the top three leading causes of death in the United States. That epidemic continued to bring visitors and leading doctors to the mountains of North Carolina. Hotels, too, were often at capacity in the summer months as visitors poured in from all directions.
For the Vanderbilt family, however, a change of scenery, a change of home, and a daughter in need of a change of schooling conspired to keep them away from Asheville more and more. George, Edith, and Cornelia often spent time in the nation’s capital, and had rented a house at 1707 New Hampshire Avenue several years earlier. As early as 1908, Biltmore Estate Industries had made its debut in the capital at Washington’s Arlington Hotel with a sale of the school’s wood carvings, embroideries, homespun fabric, and baskets. Washington was closer to North Carolina than New York City, and the city also provided excellent schooling options for Cornelia, who would soon be starting high school. There was also an active social scene with which George and Edith were already familiar, and excellent museums to satisfy even George’s well-honed tastes. In 1912, George bought a home at 1612 K Street in Washington, DC, which was formerly owned by Senator Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania and which added a fresh mortgage to George’s ledger.
The Vanderbilts continued to travel—and spend—overseas as well. Edith had been sitting for noted Italian portraitist Giovanni Boldini, a friend of Whistler’s who had moved into John Singer Sargent’s Paris studio when that painter relocated to London. Boldini told Edith he wanted her dressed in a black gown, and that she should bring along a chinchilla boa and a black picture hat. The Ferrara native lamented to American Art News that the increasing popularity of automobile travel had made his subjects restless, and that getting women to pose had become a challenge. “Their features lack the calm necessary to a successful painting,” Boldini told the publication.
“But Mrs. Vanderbilt,” Boldini stated, “has the repose of a statue.”
George paid a reported $15,000 for the full-length portrait, and when the Paris Salon of 1911 arrived, Boldini sketched the arrangement of paintings he desired for four portraits and a still life that would hang in Salle 13. At the center of the five paintings in the position of greatest honor was “Mme G. V.”—Edith’s exuberant and dramatic portrait, complete with boa.
Whenever away, George stayed in touch with Chauncey Beadle, who had emerged as an indispensable part of estate management and life. George still did not have a buyer for the bulk of Pisgah Forest, though he had, in 1911, managed to sell timber rights to 20,000 acres. The reported price was in excess of $500,000.
On February 20, 1912, Beadle wrote George, his employer now of twenty-two years, in Paris. It had been a severe winter, making it difficult to work in the forest, he wrote. He appreciated George’s “encouragement” insofar as Beadle’s “effort to exploit the Pisgah Forest property with the Federal Authorities.”
Spring found George and Edith in Paris. Assessing their travel options for the trip back across the Atlantic, they had a chance to book passage on the maiden voyage of the White Star’s newest, most luxurious ocean liner.
A ship named Titanic.