Lady on the Hill: How Biltmore Estate Became an American Icon

by Howard E. Covington, The Biltmore Company Narrated by Mirron Willis

Overview

This is the story of Biltmore Estate's transformation from a financial drain for George Vanderbilt and his heirs -- banker David Rockefeller called it a"a white elephant" -- into an unparalled example of private preservation and the most important working asset of the western North Carolina travel industry.  No one gave Biltmore's future a chance, but George Vanderbilt's grandson, William A. V. Cecil, persevered over thirty-five years, and his determination, creativity and vision produced an enterprise whose profits he used to preserve his patrimony.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Set amid thousands of lushly landscaped acres in the North Carolina mountains, the Biltmore estate is a 250-room Gilded Age mansion stuffed to the rafters with objets d'art. Writing a very authorized business history rather than an architectural appreciation, journalist Covington celebrates the estate's transformation from quasifeudal folly to lucrative tourist mecca. Built in 1895 by George Vanderbilt, who played lord of the manor to hundreds of tenant farmers and servants, the estate passed in the 1960s to his grandson William Cecil, whose tight-fisted budgets, canny marketing initiatives and rapt attention to customer service turned it into a profitable museum of robber-baron privilege, selling more tickets than Colonial Williamsburg. The author's sycophantic account of this not unduly exciting saga is mainly a tribute to Cecil, who wrote the afterword. Covington defends the Biltmore owner's model of private, for-profit historical preservation against charges of commercialism leveled by nonprofit preservationists, repeats his complaints about inheritance taxes, extols his entrepreneurial daring, salutes his Biltmore restoration projects ("surpassed what many had seen anywhere") and raves about "customer satisfaction reports... comparable to those enjoyed by a five-star resort." This anodyne hospitality-industry success story will find a place in the Biltmore gift shop, but probably nowhere else. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176330168
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/20/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	799,708

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