The Last Castle

Denise Kiernan’s The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home (2017) is the true story of the Gilded Age mansion Biltmore House, the largest and most grand residence ever constructed in the United States. The story follows Edith Stuyvesant Dresser and George Vanderbilt, a wealthy and bookish man dedicated to erecting a European-style estate on 125,000 acres in North Carolina. Spanning the World Wars, the Roaring Twenties, and the Depression and featuring well-known characters such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton, The Last Castle tells the unique story of America’s largest house.

Edith Stuyvesant Dresser’s Dutch ancestor Peter Stuyvesant governed “New Amsterdam,” or modern-day Manhattan. George Washington Vanderbilt was the grandson of “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt. In his day, the Commodore left his family to begin a ferry business that took people to Manhattan from Staten Island. He also invested in steamboat lines, allowing him to expand and create a network of steamships and railways. This eventually led to his control over the New York Central railroad.

George’s father, William, inherited the Commodore’s wealth, totaling $90 million, which he doubled within six years, accumulating perhaps the greatest fortune in America or even the world at the time. The Vanderbilt name, once associated with river rats and farming, became known for power and wealth. In 1885, George’s father died, and George, just twenty-three, inherited $13 million, approximately $318 million today.



That year, George moved south to Asheville, a resort and wellness center. It was there that he first saw Mount Pisgah, a location that George believed was his own Promised Land. In an effort to outdo his friends in the so-called Four Hundred—equivalent to today’s wealthiest 1 percent—he set out to build an extravagant mansion where the air he breathed would be good for his health. George eventually amassed 125,000 acres that included forest, dairy and hog farms, herbariums, and other progressive initiatives.

George then asked landscape architects Frederick Law Olmstead and Richard Morris Hunt to design his vision for Biltmore and its surroundings. Roughly, a thousand workers helped to construct the French Renaissance-style house. With thirty-three bedrooms, forty-three restrooms, sixty-five fireplaces, and three kitchens, the mansion spanned 175,000 square feet. Completed in 1895, it became the largest house in America.

The name “Biltmore” is a contraction of an ancestral name, “Bilt,” and “moor.” George, however, did not stop at naming the mansion and attempted to stamp the name on local institutions, such as the post office. This led to “anti-Biltmore” protests and a sense of grievance about snobbery.



George and Edith married in 1898. Their marriage represented yet another match influenced by societal rank and the union of two prominent American families. Driven by her feudal duty of noblesse oblige, Edith made connections in the Asheville community and established a school, the Boys’ Brigade, and the Young Men’s Institute for the black community. With the help of George, she also oversaw the construction of a hospital as well as the Biltmore Industries. Kiernan describes how Edith walked in both the world of Victorian elegance and that of a simple and rugged mountain life. She gave birth to Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt in 1900.

The book details how around the turn of the century, American industry was booming, and the richest families in the country were profiting greatly. As income inequality widened, social pressures began to tear the very fabric of society. Biltmore sat isolated in an anachronistic allure, a monument of denial that a new age was approaching. Although the Panic of 1907 greatly affected George’s finances, he and Edith continued to travel and entertain artists, presidents, and the elite class.

Biltmore House existed as a private entity for less than forty years before the stock market crash of 1929, which threatened the remaining fortune of the Vanderbilt family. The majority of the estate was quickly sold.



When George died in 1914, the responsibility of safeguarding the family legacy fell on Edith. The estate faced additional hardship due to the introduction of a new national income tax, a destructive hurricane, and World War I.

Cornelia gave birth to George Henry Vanderbilt Cecil in 1925. Alongside her mother, Cornelia initiated a journey to save Biltmore, which today plays host to over a million visitors a year.

A castle in America, Biltmore represents opulence once imagined and then lost. Kiernan’s work creates a world that is contextually rich in its conveyance of the social, economic, and political history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part social critique, part journalism, and part diary, the book’s vast narrative effectually characterizes the social elite and the era in which they flourished.