In the late 1880s, twenty-five-year-old George Vanderbilt, the grandson of industrialist Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, went horseback riding through the Blue Ridge Mountains in Asheville, North Carolina. As he crested the top of a hill and gazed out over the peaks and valleys of the land below him, he made a decision: on this piece of earth, he was going to build a chateau. He purchased 125,000 acres of land and enlisted his friend, Richard Morris Hunt, to be the architect. Six years and over 1,000 laborers later, the Biltmore Estate would become the largest privately owned mansion in America. Today, the Biltmore Estate has downsized from 125,000 acres to a…