February 2020 Issue

HISTORY
Meet the Cecils: The Legendary Family behind the Vanderbilt/Biltmore
Estate name (part three of four)
BY BILL BRANYON • ASHEVILLE
Asheville’s New Zoning Czar
While Gascoyne was considered a
leading conservative, another Cecil was
called by historian Susan Pedersen in
her book The Guardians, a “maverick
Conservative and internationalist.”
America’s largest privately-owned home, the Biltmore Estate. Owned by William
Amherst Vanderbilt Cecil Jr. (Photo in public domain.)
This was Lord Robert Cecil, who
Pedersen claims became [Woodrow]
Wilson’s leading British partner in establishing
the League of Nations.” The
sixth son of Gascoyne, he was awarded
the 1937 Nobel Peace Prize for his
tireless efforts to establish and make the
League effective.
In his 1912 Memorandum on Proposals
for Diminishing the Occasion of Future
Wars, Robert stated that a world peace league
would need to use “sanctions, including blockade,
… to force countries to submit to peaceful
procedures. If overwhelming naval and financial
power could be combined in a peace system,
no modern State could ultimately resist its
pressure.” The rise of Nazism put a major crimp
in Robert’s certainty of this. Still, he remained
optimistic enough to enthusiastically support the
establishment of the United Nations to replace
the League of Nations after World War II.
A branch of the Cecil family finally moved to
America and Asheville in 1924 when John Cecil
married Cornelia, daughter of George Vanderbilt
— the Biltmore Housebuilder. According to
Britannica, John was the third son of the third
son of [sic] of the Third Marquess of Exeter. Even
title-mad England balked at granting titles to
third sons twice removed. And John’s father was
merely the “Groom in Waiting” to Queen Victoria
and the “Extra Gentleman Usher” to George V.
There was hardly any chance that John was
going to inherit the family mansion called the
Dillington House, but then he met the artistic, enchanting
Cornelia Vanderbilt while serving as 1st
Secretary of the British Ambassador to America.
Thus, when they married in 1924, John became
the titular head of a home almost twice as big
as either of the family leviathans of Burghley and
Hatfield. Those two mansions are about 90,000
square feet compared to the 179,000 square
foot Biltmore House.
According to Denise Kiernan, author of The
Last Castle, Cornelia continued to partly own
the mansion even after she divorced John and
moved to England while changing her hair to
pink and her name to Nilcha. However, in 1950
she received the last payment of a $2 million settlement
completely divesting her of any shares in
the Estate. The Cecil family from thenceforward
controlled the mansion.
America’s largest privately-owned home, the
Biltmore Estate. Owned by William Amherst Vanderbilt
Cecil Jr. (Photo in public domain.)
The elder son of Cornelia (Nilcha) and John
was George, who chose to inherit the vast lands
surrounding the Biltmore Estate when John died
in 1954. That left his brother, William, with the
Biltmore Mansion. William returned to America
at the end of World War II, serving with
distinction in the British navy, and continued
his father’s legacy of making the
Biltmore Estate the incredibly popular
tourist destination that it is today.
In the book, Lady on the Hill about
the Biltmore House, Howard Covington
tells how William hooked up to America’s
de facto royalty — to Camelot
no less — in 1957 when he married
Jackie Onassis Kennedy’s first cousin,
Mary Lee Ryan. This proved even
more important when it became known
that the trajectory of a new interstate,
I-40, was headed directly for the Biltmore
House property. William hoped to utilize
his Jackie K. connection to discuss the
road with JFK, but the President was assassinated
before William could arrange it. However,
he did eventually negotiate with the U.S. Department
of Transportation, and the Biltmore Estate
remains the serene oasis it is today. William died
in 2017, and his son, William Jr., currently runs
the property.
It’s beyond the scope of this article to track
down how much land the Asheville Cecils
owned. But if you subtract the 86,000 acres,
Edith V. sold to help found Pisgah National
Forest from the 125,000 acres that George V.
originally bought, that leaves 39,000 acres — 61
square miles. The city of Asheville covers only 45
square miles.
It’s true that Edith also sold the land for Biltmore
Forest and Village, and some land was lost
to the Blue Ridge Parkway, I-26, and I-40. Still,
her children and grandchildren bought many
additional acres, as well as numerous hotel and
office properties.
Some of this land has been transformed into
‘Cecil’s’ continued on page 23
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