George Vanderbilt was the foppish and introverted favorite son of the world’s richest man. This seems like it would be an enviable position; and it was—made all the more enviable by the timing of his dad’s death (and thus, his sizable inheritance) which occurred around George’s 23rd birthday, in 1885. George Vanderbilt thus became the world’s first Trustafarian, albeit in a distinctly Gilded Age idiom: buying a small plot of land (195 square miles) near Asheville, North Carolina, building a modest cottage that he called Biltmore (at 175,000 square feet, still the largest private home in America), and indulging his proto-hippie hobbies: sustainable forestry, scientific farming, animal husbandry, and garden design. He also displayed a prescient interest in alternative energy, though in those days this meant an “alternative” to having all your crap pulled around by a mule. So, when he was chauffeured around Paris in 1903 in this new thing called An Automobile,...
- 3/15/2010
- Vanity Fair
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