Having completed the Natchez Trace, I continued on to Natchez, Mississippi. Somehow it seemed inevitable. Another old town full of old houses. Not plantation houses. These were the estates or, I would say, the town houses. Built by the planters to show how much money they had. Back before the Civil War, at one point the majority of the millionaires in the United States were in Natchez. So they had a lot to show off. And they surely did. Big, graceful houses. Spacious to catch the breezes off the Mississippi on all those 90+ days. With details from all over the world. And I never knew there were so many things you could put gold leaf on.
Maybe it has something to do with having recently sold a 200 year old farmhouse, but I love these old houses. They have so many stories and they speak a language I understand.
Then from one sort of house to another. I had passed through Asheville, North Carolina on my way to Savannah. This time I came back to see Vanderbilt's Biltmore house. It is unbelievable. Even though not all of the original 250,000 acres are still there, it's still three miles from the gatehouse to the main house. I swear I've seen smaller castles in Europe. It is hard to imagine that a house that is measured in acres could look and feel like a home, but somehow this one manages. The walls drip with Sargent portraits (he commissioned Sargent, one of my all time favorite painters BTW, to do portraits, not of the family, but of the architect for the house and of Olmstead who did the gardens and as much of the rest of the property as he could get to in his lifetime) and then there is a wall of Durer prints, including the inaccurate rhinoceros. I thought I had some acquaintance with the Vanderbilt style after seeing the house in Long Island, the one in Hyde Park and The Breakers in Newport, but I had no idea. The house parties here would leave Downton Abbey in the dust. And somehow, through it all, you do see real people and a family, which is perhaps the most amazing thing of all.
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