Biltmore, a national treasure

October 2019 marked my fourth visit to Asheville, North Carolina’s Biltmore, the United States’ largest private home. On my first visit, I resisted paying $20 to tour some rich person’s house just because it had an obscene number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Enchanted by a gift shop’s beautiful Belle Époque memorabilia, however, I sprang for the house tour. I think it was the shop’s Victorian music box’s delicate plinking song that finally influenced me to plunk down an Andrew Jackson to go inside the house. The beauty I saw there took my breath away. The history I learned through George Vanderbilt’s vision for technology (mechanical refrigeration, flush toilets, for example), art, and sustainable forestry inspired.

My subsequent tours with different groups of family and friends were no less inspiring. This autumn, our visit day’s torrential rains kept many crowds away, which was to our advantage, but sadly, prevented our touring the gardens and conservatory, so maybe my fourth visit was a tad less inspiring but certainly through no fault of the house. Now admission is just shy of $74. I would have balked at that, but for my eagerness to time-travel to that era’s showcase of beauty, civility, and tranquility. The house tour was four-plus hours, but I have space to share only a few notable impressions here.

 

George Vanderbilt loved Christmas and opened his country retreat, Biltmore estate, to friends and family on Christmas Eve, 1895, after six years of construction. Because Robert and I visited the week before the Biltmore’s two-month Christmas events began, you will see in my pics some Christmas decorations already in place. My post also reflects Vanderbilt’s passions for art, literature, and horticulture.

Vanderbilt’s vision was profoundly inspired by architect Richard Morris Hunt and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Two of famous portraitist John Singer Sargent’s framed portraits hanging in Biltmore house are of these two men. Olmsted’s influence is seen in the forests lining the miles-long, winding entrance road to the estate. Meticulously curated trees of myriad varieties and colors were wondrous to behold. I was so struck by these forests’ unique, majestic beauty, I did not want to take my eyes off them long enough to snap a photo. After George Vanderbilt died at age 51 in 1914, his widow Edith sold to the federal government 86,700 acres of Biltmore estate for a national park. This land became part of Pisgah National Forest in 1916. What a legacy!

In the house hang hundreds of framed prints and woodcuts bought by Vanderbilt. In the array shown here, the farthest right frame contains Dürer’s famous rhino print. In 1515 Albrecht Dürer based his drawing of a rhinoceros on other people’s descriptions of an animal with scales, resembling a tortoise, and well-armored to remain safe if attacked by an elephant. His 1515 woodcut was one of the first to be mass-printed in Europe, and since most people had never laid eyes on a rhino, they believed Dürer’s rendition to be accurate. It wasn’t until 100 years later that people became aware that an actual rhinoceros does not have scales or a shell. Another irony in this is that Dürer’s legacy includes more than 1,000 drawings based on actual observation of the natural world. He usually only represented what he had actually seen. Ironic that this inaccurate one “went viral.”

Vanderbilt ran out of time before reading all 22,000 of his beloved books, but a docent showed us his journal indicating he had read 3,159 books, the last before he died being a history of the United States.

Oh, the stories we heard from our audio guides … Okay, two more. Just in case the Nazis showed up on our soil to pillage our country’s great works of art during World War II, Edith helped the National Gallery of Art hide priceless artworks at the Biltmore. Although George ran a tight ship (All clocks in the house, barns, and out-buildings were synchronized), George and Edith were kind to their servants and families, ensuring their literacy education and health care, bringing food baskets to their homes, and giving generous Christmas gifts to the children. George loved Christmas.

Old-fashioned soda fountain in Asheville art gallery

A 2019 San Pellegrino toast to nostalgia!

Although no longer a five-and-dime store, Woolworth Walk is a worthy destination because today it is the largest art gallery in Asheville featuring only local artists, 170 to be exact. We spent several hours on two different days enjoying artists’ creations on both floors of the huge store. The first day we saw the cool luncheonette counter and came back the second time to see the art again but also to eat lunch.

Asheville’s F. W. Woolworth Building, established in 1938 and restored in 2001, is a nostalgic dip into the soda fountains of my youth. Cherry phosphates were my favorite, and Green Rivers. Didn’t see those the day we ate lunch at Asheville’s counter, and didn’t think to ask. Their Old-Fashioned Soda sign includes Shirley Temples. They serve espresso drinks and curried dishes today, which I don’t remember being popular in the 1950s. Anyway, our lunch sandwiches, including the obligatory dill pickle and coleslaw in oval plastic-weave baskets, were delicious. Gluten-free bread was also not a thing in the ’50s but I’m grateful they have it now.

We learned a sad segregation story. In 1960 African-Americans were allowed to work the luncheonette counter but not to eat at it. Grrr … After one incident, many sit-ins and six months of negotiations resulted in a more equitable policy for Woolworth’s. 

Dawn Rhythms

Tick. Tick. Tick.  I open my eyes at 7:30. From my pillow I see two trees, mountains beyond. The once stately trees have mostly dead branches now but birds seem to love the branches still alive with leaves silhouetted against pale gray sky. So I watch the birds in silence as they flit and flutter. I recognize the shapes of a cardinal couple and a jay. Others I do not know. I get up to open the window. I want to hear their songs. Their chirps and caws chorus with the clock’s ticks, whooss of car tires, dog yips, and voices from houses. Sound carries in a valley.

Standing by the window now, I see “my” horse Pearl grazing below on frosty grass. Behind Pearl’s lea, white frosted rooftops zig-zag up a hill fringed with points of dark green pines. Behind the pines are mountains still brown with the night.

Soon, sun rising behind that massive, undulating brown backdrop turns grays to golds on opposite mountain. Soon a brilliant red cardinal bobs among crimson leaves and a blue, black, and white jay swoops from rust to yellow to reds. He twitches his tail on leaves still glistening with dew. The sky is clear blue. In brighter light, the leafy avian playground empties of activity. Birdsong quiets. Pearl plods from low-lying still-white areas of her meadow to her little knoll now green and gold. More voices rise from the valley. Day has dawned. Time’s a-ticking.

Going Way, Way Back … Cave Dwellings

So … in 3 B.C., Roman masons built a three-arch, interlocking-limestone-block bridge over the Calavon River. At the time, northern Italy and Spain were connected through southern France by the Via Domitia, of which this bridge was a part. As we tooled around Provence, we saw signs indicating remnants of the Via Domitia. And the bridge, Pont Julien, named after Julius Caesar, still stands a few miles outside Bonnieux. Pont Julien carried traffic for more than 2000 years, but today is reserved for bicycle traffic.
 

Before the village of Bonnieux came to be, settlers in the Luberon Valley lived down by the Pont Julien. At some point they felt the need to protect themselves from enemies, so they moved into limestone caves on the nearest hill.

Our Experience Luberon group got to tour one of these caves! Our first Sunday in Bonnieux, we walked down from the old church at the very top of the hill to the home of a friend of Kathy and Charley. Their friend, Michelle, gave us a tour of her family home whose bottom level (the cave) was built in the sixth century, the next level in the twelfth century, and the top level in the eighteenth century. She had learned from archeologists how the cave dwellers had lived there.

Into dim golden light, we ducked our heads through low tunnels and gingerly placed feet on uneven rock to hear Michelle tell about the early inhabitants of her family home. She showed us where spring water would have come in from a spot high on a wall. People had dug trenches to direct the water where they needed it. She showed us a little alcove where they would have hung game they had hunted. Again, trenches would have directed animal blood away. A cool pit carved into the floor would have preserved meat. People probably would have slept on a slightly elevated more-or-less flat area in the same “room.”

This beige cave led into another, and then another, all paths and walls very roughly hewn inside the mountain. In this higgledy-piggledy cave arrangement, early inhabitants crushed grapes, ground grain, skinned animals, tanned hides, and cured meats. Imagine the smells!

At some point, probably the early 1100s, the Knights Templar lived in Michelle’s caves. I am not sure if it was they who built the second level, but whoever did carved the year 1130 into the wall. Front-line soldiers lived in the bottom caves and officers lived on the next level up. A hole in the bottom-cave ceiling was a “shouting tube” through which officers could shout down orders to their men. Upstairs, the shouting hole had a stone plug in it.

Michelle’s grandfather was an expert ironworker. She showed us a model he had made for a railing he was commissioned to make for LeTrain Bleu restaurant in the Gare de Lyon in Paris. His ironwork’s ornateness was quite the contrast to the crude, but effective, chipped, gouged limestone of the cave dwellers.

Bridge photo credit: www.editionsaris.com. I bought this bridge postcard.