Biltmore House over the lagoon, Biltmore, NC, circa 1915

About this postcard

Biltmore House, George Vanderbilt's French Renaissance-style mansion in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, stands on a wooded rise above a still lagoon. The long limestone facade carries steep slate roofs, dormers, and corner turrets; lily pads spread across the water in the foreground, and dense trees frame the view on both sides, with a blossoming tree on the grassy bank in the middle distance. Richard Morris Hunt designed the house and Frederick Law Olmsted laid out the grounds, shaping the approach roads and the sheet of water that gives the card its view. Built in the 1890s as a country estate, the property also supported a working farm and some of the earliest managed forestry in the United States, which shaped the wooded setting seen here.