December 24, 1895: The Biltmore Estate Opens

December 24, 1895: The Biltmore Estate opens, in Asheville, North Carolina. It goes on to become a major tourist attraction in the Great Smoky Mountains, which straddle the State Line between western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee.

George Washington Vanderbilt II -- sometimes listed as "George Washington Vanderbilt III," and the Estate recognizes him as such today -- was 1 of 9 children born to William Henry Vanderbilt, who not only became the richest man in America upon the death of his father, "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, but ran his father's railroad holdings well enough to doubled his fortune.

George Washington Vanderbilt II

George II and his mother, the former Maria Louisa Kissam, began to make regular visits to the Asheville area in the 1880s. He loved the scenery and climate so much that he decided to build a Summer house in the area, which he called his "little mountain escape." He wanted his own getaway from New York City, as his older brothers and sisters had built in such places as the Gold Coast of Long Island, New York, near the Oyster Bay home of Theodore Roosevelt); in Hyde Park, Dutchess County, New York, near the home of James and Sara Delano Roosevelt, who were raising young Franklin there at the time; and in Newport, Rhode Island.

Vanderbilt named his estate Biltmore, combining De Bilt, his ancestors' place of origin in the Netherlands, with more, an open, rolling land. He eventually bought 125,000 acres of land. A spokesman for the estate said that much of the land had been "in very poor condition, and many of the farmers and other landowners were glad to sell." It took from 1889 to 1895 to finish the estate to his specifications, costing him about $5 million (about $174 million in 2022 money), and he opened it with a lavish party on Christmas Eve.

Vanderbilt died in 1914, the result of an appendectomy gone wrong, only 51 years old. He left behind a wife, Edith; a daughter, Cornelia, only 14; and the Estate, including a massive art collection. Cornelia married and had 2 sons, and she opened the Estate to the public in 1930, hoping to boost tourism to the Asheville area in the face of the Great Depression.

Cornelia died in 1976, leaving the Estate to her son, William Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil. He had previously formed the Biltmore Company to run the Estate as a hotel and resort. He died in 2017, and the Cecil family still runs the Estate. Its artworks, gardens and conservatory are still open to public tours.

The estate has been used on numerous occasions as a filming location for movies and television shows including Being There in 1979, Mr. Destiny in 1990, Forrest Gump in 1994, and My Fellow Americans in 1996. And it still hosts a Christmas festival every year.

UPDATE: In 2023, A Biltmore Christmas aired on The Hallmark Channel, the first movie to actually be set at the Estate. Jonathan Frakes, one of the stars of Star Trek: The Next Generation, directed, and plays the Estate's caretaker. The film tells of an earlier movie filmed there, the Christmas-themed His Merry Wife, and surviving artifacts of that movie on display.

Bethany Joy Lenz, who's starred in several of those charming, cheesy and oh-so-predictable Hallmark Christmas Movies, plays a screenwriter who inadvertently uses a magical hourglass to travel back to the filming of the movie in 1947. She knows that one of the movie's stars, who played a guardian angel, similar to Clarence in the contemporary It's a Wonderful Life, died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve 1948, only 35 years old. He left no survivors. But when they meet on the set, they fall in love. She tells him about the hourglass. She decides she can't stay, and gets back to the present.

One year later, the Christmas movie she's written is a hit, and, on Christmas Eve, she can't help but think about the doomed actor. He appears, having set it up with the movie's male lead to cover for him, so that the world will think he died suddenly, and he used the hourglass to travel to his future and meet the writer, so they can live happily ever after, just like in a movie.

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December 24, 1895 was a Tuesday. There were no scores on this day: Baseball was out of season, football usually didn't play on Christmas Eve, basketball barely existed, and hockey was all-amateur, with none of what then passed for "major leagues" having any games on this day.