What is the dark history of the biltmore estate?
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Bill Cecil's Biltmore: Telling the family story
"Be careful. You don't want to touch that," Bill Cecil says, walking through the library of the Biltmore House.
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He points out a priceless 1,000-year-old Chinese porcelain bowl, once used to pack eggs in mud to make the emperor's culinary delicacy, 100-year-old eggs.
"That just sounds like rotten eggs to me," he joked.
For Cecil, the Biltmore isn’t just a museum of well-dusted antiques collected by his great-grandfather.
George Vanderbilt built the French-style chateau on the banks of the French Broad River in 1895 to entertain his guests during the Gilded Age. Boasting some 250 rooms, Biltmore remains America's largest private home and Asheville's premier tourist draw, entertaining 1.4 million guests last year.
In Vanderbilt’s day, the house would perhaps hold up to 100 people for a special occasion.
Now, as many as 3,800 people come through the house on a typical day and over 10,000 on Christmas tours, with each guest trying to