At Home - Bill Bryson [120]
George Vanderbilt filled Biltmore with the finest of everything Europeans would sell him, which in the late 1880s was practically everything—tapestries, furnishings, classic works of art. The scale recalls, and in some crucial respects exceeds, the manic excesses of William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey. The dining room table could seat seventy-six. The ceiling was seventy-five feet above the floor. It must have been like living on the concourse of a major railway station.
For the grounds he brought in the aging Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park in New York, who persuaded George to turn much of the estate into experimental forest. The U.S. secretary of agriculture, J. Sterling Morton, marveled that Vanderbilt employed more men and had a larger budget for his single forest than Morton had for an entire federal department. The estate had two hundred miles of roads. It included a town—a small city, really—complete with schools, a hospital, churches, railroad station, banks, and shops to serve the estate’s two thousand employees and their families. Workers lived a prosperous but semifeudal existence, bound by many rules. They were not allowed to keep dogs, for instance. To support the estate, George’s forests were logged for timber, and his many farms produced fruit, vegetables, dairy products, eggs, poultry, and livestock. He also engaged in some manufacturing and processing.
George intended to live there with his mother for part of each year, but she died soon after Biltmore was completed, so he resided alone, in massive solitude, until 1898 when he married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser, with whom he produced a single child, Cornelia. By this point it was becoming clear that the estate was an economic disaster. Annual losses were running at $250,000, and George had to keep the place afloat out of a dwindling stock of capital. In 1914, he died suddenly. His wife and daughter sold as much of the estate as they could as quickly as they could, and declined ever to have anything to do with it again.
II
We might pause here for a moment to consider where we are and why. We are downstairs in the passage, as domestic corridors were called on most architectural plans in the nineteenth century. It is the least congenial and most gloomy space in the house, since it has no windows and must take whatever natural light it can through the open doors of neighboring rooms. Slightly more than halfway along is a door that could be shut—and in earlier days no doubt was—to divide the service side of the house from the private domain. Just beyond that, near the back staircase, is a niche in the wall that can’t have been there when the house was built, for it is clearly designed to hold something that didn’t exist in 1851 but that would change the world, and change it more quickly than anyone imagined. It is that niche in particular that has brought us here.
If you have wondered in recent pages what the abundant wealth of Americans in the Gilded Age has to do with a downstairs corridor in an English house, the answer is: more than you might think. From this point onward, the direction and momentum of modern life were determined increasingly by American events, American inventions, American interests and demands. For Europeans that was a source of some dismay, but a little exciting, too, for Americans did things in ways no one had before.
They were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether or not those things would be of any use. The absolute quintessence of the phenomenon was Thomas Edison. Nobody was better (or worse, depending on how you choose to view it) at inventing things that had no obvious need or purpose. Overall, Edison was of course immensely successful and a huge generator of wealth. By 1920, it has been estimated, the industries his inventions and refinements spawned were worth,