By: Jennifer Richardson Holt
We began our mountain vacation with a bang. That first full day brimmed with the kind of moments that stay with a family for years — long after we’re tired of scrolling through the photos and long after we’ve burned off the extra pounds from all the delectable food. Yet beneath all the fun and fullness, the day carried a surprising depth of meaning for me. None of the sights were new, but somehow I saw them with fresh eyes, from new angles, and those new angles opened unexpected doors of understanding.
Our first destination was the Biltmore Estate. For anyone unfamiliar, it’s the largest privately owned home in America — and it certainly lives up to that distinction. It isn’t every day you get to wander through a house boasting 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, and three kitchens. And those are only the domestic rooms. There’s also the heated indoor swimming pool, the bowling alley, and the electric elevator. Considering all of this was completed in 1895, the word incredible feels far too small to describe how breathtaking it must have felt to people then.
My daughter absolutely reveled in the estate, its gardens, and its grounds stretching all the way to the ridgelines. She insisted she belonged there — and as someone who has felt that exact tug, I understood completely. Not because either of us imagines ourselves aristocrats in need of mansions; our roots are humble, and our lives still follow that modest thread. But royalty has always fascinated us both, and Biltmore is about as close as America comes to a kingdom. Every time my daughter paused, she said she was “princessing,” and she truly was — twirling, singing enchantingly, and sitting in each chair with the careful grace of someone in a jewel-encrusted ballgown.
The entire estate drips with opulence and extravagance. If that sort of thing interests you, it’s the be-all and end-all of places to visit. I confess: I adore it. Even if grandeur isn’t your cup of tea — or cut-crystal flute of champagne, in this case — it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer excess of it all. We were still floating on that lavishness as we left North Carolina and crossed into Tennessee. But before climbing into the higher elevations, we stopped, as we often do, at a familiar visitor center. And it was there that perspective landed on me like a ton of bricks.
Beside the visitor center sits an old homestead preserved from more than a century ago: a farmhouse, chicken coop, hog pen, barn, and a cluster of simple log buildings nestled by a river. Everything is rustic and hand-hewn, the kind of place where the original settlers of this region lived their daily lives.
I was watching the chickens wander near the garden when it struck me: at the very same time in history that a family had lived and worked on this tiny farm — a mother cooking a plucked chicken over a hearth in a two-room cabin with no running water, electricity, or plumbing — just down the road stood a 125,000-acre estate with a 178,926-square-foot mansion, 70-foot ceilings, and a dining hall table long enough to seat 64 guests.
These two homes existed not only in the same world but at the same moment.
I couldn’t imagine what either family — the riverside farmers or the Vanderbilts — would have thought upon seeing the other’s life. What words could possibly have formed on that farmwife’s lips if she’d witnessed maids bustling through three kitchens or seen the walk-in refrigerators? And how bewildered or even horrified might the Vanderbilt daughter have been upon seeing several children sleeping on a corn-shuck mattress? What would they have said to one another? Would they even have wanted to speak? The juxtaposition of those two households left me standing there in the cabin yard staring at chickens as if they were the world’s greatest mystery.
Though the homes were geographically close, they may as well have existed in two different galaxies. And yet here I am, in some way beyond both. The technologies and comforts of today would boggle the minds of both households, just as their extremes — of extravagance and of simplicity — boggle mine. I am not wealthy, nor do I live in a mansion. But I also don’t live in a kerosene-lit cabin with an outhouse. I live in a world where nearly anything is at my fingertips, a privilege neither of those families could have imagined.
It is a strange thing to be both richer and poorer than those who lived in both those homes. Each life had challenges, lessons, joys, and limits. And as I consider all I have and all I lack, I find myself grateful — grateful to be here, now, in this moment in history. Grateful to rest in the knowledge that I am precisely where and when I am meant to be.
Prose and Possibilities 