George Vanderbilt arrived near Asheville in the late 1880s and started buying land — parcel by parcel, until he held 125,000 acres. What he built on it reshaped the region in ways no single estate should. He hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the grounds, Richard Morris Hunt to design the house, and Carl Schenck to manage the forests — Schenck opened the Biltmore Forest School in 1898, the first school of professional forestry in the United States. He funded the YMI Cultural Center in 1892 for the African American men building his estate, after community leaders approached him directly. Richard Sharp Smith, supervising architect on the Biltmore site, designed the planned worker village below it. In 1914, Edith Vanderbilt sold 86,700 acres to the federal government; Pisgah National Forest was established in 1916. One man's property became the blueprint for American conservation.
