Outdoor wooden patio overlooking the Blue Ridge mountains. Table and chairs shaded by a tree in the afternoon sun.
Biltmore Estate is a large ( acre or square miles) private estate and tourist attraction in Asheville, North Carolina. Biltmore House, the main house on the estate, is a Châteauesque-styled mansion built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895 and is the largest privately owned house in the United States, at 178,926 square feet (16, m2) of floor space (135,280 square feet (12,568 m2) of living area). Still owned by one of Vanderbilt's descendants, it stands today as one of the most prominent remaining examples of the Gilded Age. In the 1880s, at the height of the Gilded Age, George Washington Vanderbilt II, youngest son of William Henry Vanderbilt, began to make regular visits with his mother, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt (1821–1896), to the Asheville, North Carolina, area. He loved the scenery and climate so much that he decided to create his own summer estate in the area, which he called his "little mountain escape", just as his older brothers and sisters had built opulent summer houses in places such as Newport, Rhode Island, and Hyde Park, New York. Vanderbilt named his estate Biltmore derived from "Bildt," Vanderbilt's ancestors' place of origin in Holland, and "More", Anglo-Saxon for open, rolling land. A portion of the estate was once the African-American community of Shiloh.
Size: 3000px × 3938px
Location: Biltmore Estate, Asheville North Carolina, USA
Photo credit: © Vincent Palermo / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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