Born on the Biltmore estate: Dave Taylor recalls a serendipitous life

BY EILEEN BRADY
THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO

In the black-and-white photograph of the chair, made of sculptured roots and yellow pine, it looks sturdy and well-built, almost new. The chair, crafted around 1900, has been handed down and moved across state lines, ending up in our neck of the woods.
At one point, though, the chair provided seating on the largest estate in the United States, the Biltmore mansion in Asheville, N.C. In fact, the wood from which it was made was almost certainly homegrown, created from trees on that property.
It was built by Dave Taylor’s father’s hands, and it is one of his most prized possessions. He considered allowing the Biltmore to once again place the chair on the estate in Asheville, and a 1974 letter from George H.V. Cecil, then president of the Biltmore Co., states that although there was a policy of not acquiring items for exhibit, Cecil was interested in personally purchasing the chair. But Taylor decided to keep it in the family.
David “Dave” Taylor of Wilmington was born in the woods at the Biltmore in 1930, which was completed in 1895 on 125,000 forested acres in western North Carolina. The home of George and Edith Vanderbilt, it was — and still is — the largest home in the United States, a 250-room French Renaissance-style château in what is now Pisgah National Forest. 

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