When Biltmore opened its doors, George Vanderbilt threw a house party — a two-week Christmas gathering that brought family and friends in by private train to the estate’s own depot, the largest reunion of the Vanderbilts since his father’s death a decade earlier. Golf was a favorite pastime of Vanderbilt and his guests during this time, and archival letters kept at the estate describe a rough set of holes staked out in a pasture below the house. The golfers were not segregated by gender: Biltmore senior public relations manager Marissa Jamison says the men and women in the party played the course together as often as not.

A brief item in the Asheville Citizen from May 20, 1895, seven months before Vanderbilt’s first house party, reported that grounds for golf, “the game which is taking such a firm hold in American sports,” were planned for the Biltmore land “to the northwest of the palace,” with the initial layout entrusted to a Thomas Fisher. What ultimately happened to those plans is unclear, as there is no evidence that a permanent course was ever constructed to the northwest of the house. What is clear is that Vanderbilt was eager to bring golf to the estate.

First-person and newspaper accounts both place a working course in play by Christmas 1895, with the family and their guests playing almost daily, according to Biltmore associate curator Meghan Forest-Singer, who researched the course’s history ahead of the estate’s involvement in this September’s Biltmore Championship Asheville. Vanderbilt, who treated every detail of his 8,000-acre estate as a personal project, liked it enough to commission something permanent. Site plans from January 1896 show a layout for golfing grounds located southwest of the house, abutting the French Broad River. From the Willie Davis drawings in the estate’s archives, Forest-Singer believes the course reached its full size by 1897.

The routing of the golfing grounds began at the Brick Farmhouse, the residence George Vanderbilt lived in while visiting Biltmore House during construction, with the first two holes heading south. From there, the course turned north for holes 3 through 6, crossing Fourmile Branch (the mountain stream on the estate that today fills the Bass Pond and waterfall) and tracing the banks of the French Broad River toward the Lagoon, where the 6th green played dead into the water as a hazard. The final holes doubled back south, crossing Fourmile Branch a second time before the round closed out where it began, back at the Brick Farmhouse — itself, like the course, now long gone.

A flood has long been blamed for the closing of the course — the story turns up in accounts from estate tour guides and in regional golf coverage — but Biltmore’s own archives point to a different explanation for the 1901 closure. “The flooding story doesn’t bear out,” Forest-Singer said. That the Lagoon played as a hazard was real, evidenced by the 1890s-era golf ball recovered from its southwest bank in 2009; however, no flood damage to the course shows up anywhere in the archival record.

What correspondence points to instead is a maintenance cost that overshadowed the actual usage of the golfing grounds. By 1900, Vanderbilt was already questioning the annual cost of the estate’s maintenance and staffing, and his daughter Cornelia’s birth pulled the family toward more time at their other homes. Forest-Singer’s own best assessment is that the course simply stopped being worth what it cost, though she stops short of calling that settled. By 1901, the family had simply stopped maintaining it, and the land returned to pasture.

The recovered ball, a gutta-percha “gutty” made by the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Co. of London, turned up close to where the 6th hole had once been. Along with a photo of the site plans for the golfing grounds, the ball now sits on display at The Vanderbilts At Home & Abroad exhibition in Antler Hill Village on the estate, the clearest physical trace left of the whole experiment — come see it for yourself.

Golf at Biltmore didn’t end there, exactly — it just moved. Edith and Cornelia Vanderbilt kept playing after George’s death in 1914, with Cornelia becoming a regular on the regional women’s tournament circuit, including events in Charlotte. The two of them eventually helped found Biltmore Forest Country Club a mile from the estate; it was a venue that would come to host professional golfing events until 1942. There is still no golf course on the Biltmore Estate today, and the estate has said it has no plans to build one.

This September, professional golf returns to the Biltmore name for the first time in 84 years when the inaugural Biltmore Championship Asheville tees off at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove, with Biltmore Estate and Explore Asheville signed on as four-year co-title sponsors. A PGA Tour field will play a Jack Nicklaus design just a short drive from the same river bottom where Vanderbilt’s own nine quietly ran its course, in every sense, more than a century ago.

The family’s fingerprints reach even the trophy. When Biltmore Championship Asheville organizers unveiled it at Media Day on August 19, they highlighted a partnership between two designers: Aubrey Cecil Baliles, founder of the jewelry brand Avermore and a great-great-granddaughter of George and Edith Vanderbilt, and locally based Marthaler Jewelers. The trophy features more than five pounds of gold-accented silver, sits on a black walnut base cut from an estate tree that Hurricane Helene brought down, and has the Pisgah-to-Mitchell ridgeline etched into its surface alongside dogwood blossoms, North Carolina’s state flower. Biltmore’s own carpenter team built the base to echo woodwork details found across Biltmore House.

Golf ran in the family well past the estate course that vanished. Edith Vanderbilt, George’s widow, was known locally for a strong golf swing in her own right, and, per Biltmore’s own account, put up trophies for area tournaments across the 1910s and into the 1920s. After his death in 1914, the company formed to develop the estate’s land had bigger ambitions than one golf course. A June 20, 1920 announcement in the Asheville Citizen described a deal for 1,500 acres along the Asheville-Hendersonville highway, backed by local investors alongside the Vanderbilt estate: An outlay of more than $500,000 for two full 18-hole golf courses, a tourist hotel, and a country club. Only one course and the club were ever built.

Biltmore Forest Country Club nearly did not survive its own construction. By the early 1920s, the development company backing it had run through its money before the clubhouse and course were finished. Biltmore Forest’s own history today puts it modestly: Cornelia Vanderbilt covered the furniture bill. The record from the time tells a bigger story. A wire dispatch datelined Asheville, October 16, 1921 reported that Cornelia, then 21, had bought the course outright, purchasing the 129.9-acre golf course from the development company for around $30,000, with a deed stipulation that the land could serve no other purpose for the next 50 years unless 80 percent of the surrounding residential park’s property owners voted to allow it. The same dispatch notes Edith sold the company a further 85.67 acres bordering the course for about $20,000, the day before.

Donald Ross designed the course itself; longtime estate horticulturist Chauncey Beadle shaped the grounds around it. One story told around the club for decades, though it has never turned up in any record, traces the whole idea back to a smaller grievance: That Edith wanted a club of her own after being asked to put out a cigarette at another Asheville club, where women were not permitted to smoke.

Whatever actually set it in motion, the grand opening on July 4, 1922 was pure Vanderbilt theater: A thousand invitations went out for a day built around golf, a canoe race staged in the clubhouse pool, and fireworks to close out the evening, with Edith herself, in a raincoat against the weather, hoisting a twenty-foot flag before Cornelia struck the ceremonial first shot at 2:30 that afternoon.

Biltmore Forest Country Club became one of the more competitive addresses in Southern golf. Its history counts Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, John D. Rockefeller, and William Jennings Bryan among its early guests, alongside two U.S. presidents, a Dutch queen, and honorary member Bobby Jones. The club hosted the PGA Tour’s Land of the Sky Open from 1939 to 1942 — Ben Hogan won all three years he entered — and, more recently, the 1999 U.S. Women’s Amateur and 2013 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur; the 2025 U.S. Senior Amateur was also awarded to Biltmore Forest before the USGA moved it to Texas after Hurricane Helene. It’s a pedigree that traces back, in a roundabout way, to a rescue investment from a twenty-one-year-old Vanderbilt heiress.

Special thanks to Marissa Jamison and Meghan Forest-Singer from The Biltmore Company for providing photos and historical information for this article.