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.
Read more about this topic: Biltmore Farms
Famous quotes containing the words actual and/or farming:
“Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)