The End of Actual Farming
Due to changing trends in the market, the dairy business was sold to Pet, Inc. in 1985, though Biltmore Farms still maintains a herd of Jersey cattle in Mills River, North Carolina, just south of Asheville. The pedigrees of many of these cows can still be traced to the original nineteenth-century herd.
Paying heed to the Vanderbilt legacy of sustainable land use practices and urban development of Biltmore Village and Biltmore Forest, both adjacent to Asheville, Biltmore Farms transformed itself into one of Western North Carolina’s most recognized community development firms. The company’s present day divisions, operated by more than 140 employees, focus on hotels, commercial real estate, home building, and master planned communities. The company’s first foray into real estate development began after Pet, Inc. vacated the dairy processing plant just outside the Biltmore Estate gates. Adaptive reuse transformed the building into a full-service hotel operation, now branded as The Doubletree Biltmore Hotel, a member of the Hilton Hotels Family. The hotel features a museum of the company’s agricultural legacy, and the adjacent T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant was the original location of the Asheville Dairy Bar.
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Famous quotes containing the words actual and/or farming:
“If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The measure discriminates definitely against products which make up what has been universally considered a program of safe farming. The bill upholds as ideals of American farming the men who grow cotton, corn, rice, swine, tobacco, or wheat and nothing else. These are to be given special favors at the expense of the farmer who has toiled for years to build up a constructive farming enterprise to include a variety of crops and livestock.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)