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. 

​The working estate employed 750 workers to run its nurseries, granaries, poultry runs, pigpens, kennels, stables and dairy, which included 700 Jersey cows. 
Taylor’s father, James “Jim” Taylor, was born in 1872 and started working in 1890 for George Vanderbilt, the youngest son of industrialist William Henry Vanderbilt and his wife, Maria Louisa Kissam. The Vanderbilt family earned its enormous fortune through steamboats, railroads and other businesses, and George was one of three sons who inherited part of a $200 million fortune when his father died in 1885.
Jim Taylor helped construct the mansion and stayed on as part of the large staff of the working estate. He helped with the gardens, which were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., who also designed Central Park in New York City and is generally considered the father of American landscape architecture. Jim Taylor also served as a “gateman,” guarding the entrance of the estate.
He continued working on the Biltmore grounds as a ranger, patrolling the thousands of acres for poachers and trespassers. He didn’t like to kill anything himself, his family has said, but when he would catch poachers in the act, they’d drop what they had shot and they’d run away. The children had plenty of venison to eat from what their father picked up that way.
George Vanderbilt housed Taylor, his wife and their three sons and a daughter in the “red house” near the property’s gardens. Jim Taylor’s first wife, Cannie, died in 1915, and Taylor later remarried a woman named Daisy, who bore three more children, including Dave Taylor.
 Dave Taylor was born in 1930 in a log house a mile or so from the main house, and their family was treated well by the incredibly wealthy Vanderbilts, especially Edith Vanderbilt, whose own daughter, Cornelia, was born in 1900 and was allowed to play with the other children on the estate. 
George Vanderbilt was kindhearted but aloof, though his wife often helped the Taylor family personally.
“Mrs. Vanderbilt was a down-to-earth woman,” says Dave Taylor, a sentiment echoed by his older half-sister, Joanna Taylor Patton, who was interviewed by the Biltmore before she died. “She’d come down and help change diapers.”
Joanna Taylor recalled that her mother entered baking contests in the Fall Fair at Biltmore and her father entered fruits and vegetables to be judged.
One year, Jim Taylor won first place for the biggest pumpkin, Joanna had told a Biltmore employee. Edith Vanderbilt tasted all the baked goods at the fair, but George Vanderbilt stayed in the carriage without mingling with employees and their families.
Edith Vanderbilt also gave George Vanderbilt’s clothes to Jim Taylor, whom she called “Jimmy,” and she gave him the first automobile he ever owned. 
Dave Taylor has a photograph of his father with the Vanderbilt grandsons, George H.V. and William A.V. Cecil, that the Biltmore enlarged and hung on display amid antique farm equipment, north of the Biltmore Winery.
After George Vanderbilt died in 1914, Jim Taylor’s son James “Oat” Taylor became a chauffeur for Edith Vanderbilt, driving her on local errands and occasionally to another Vanderbilt family house on the eastern seaboard.  
Chauncey Beadle, hired by Frederick Law Olmsted to oversee the nursery at Biltmore, ended up staying at the estate for 60 years; he was a good friend of Jim Taylor and always remembered the children in later years. He served as estate superintendent in later years.
It was a charmed existence in an idyllic setting, until Jim Taylor died of tapeworm in 1936, and Mrs. Taylor was unable to provide for all of the children. 
“Mom never worked in her life, and here she had seven kids,” Dave Taylor says.
A North Carolina judge ordered five of the children to be sent hundreds of miles north to the Junior Order United American Mechanics National Orphans Home in Tiffin, Ohio, also known as the Junior Home. Two girls stayed with their mother. Dave Taylor was barely 7 years old.
The change could have introduced a Dickensian twist on the story. However, Dave Taylor and his siblings thrived in the orphanage. He could not imagine a more nurturing environment, and he still remains in touch with many of the others who grew up at the orphanage. 
“They were the best days of my life,” he says.
The orphanage, established in 1896, was a self-supporting community of approximately 40 buildings, populated in those years by as many as 1,200 residents.
There were residential cottages, a gymnasium, schools (both academic and vocational), a hospital, a bank, a post office, a cannery, a library, a power plant, a chapel, a greenhouse and a central dining hall.
Each year, the former residents of the orphanage still gather for a homecoming. “Tiffin and Findley is full of us kids,” Dave Taylor says. 
In 1940, when Dave Taylor was 10 years old, the Tiffin orphanage sent 240 kids to a new branch orphanage in Lexington, N.C., also a Junior Order home much like the one in Ohio. Dave and his siblings were sent on a train to North Carolina.
Almost 200 boys, 17 and older, entered the military to help with the effort in World War II. 
The North Carolina orphanage was a working farm, and it was as welcoming to Dave Taylor as the Tiffin home had been. There was plenty of fresh air, plenty of time for sports. He picked cotton for a nearby farmer for a penny a pound.
“The only thing I didn’t like — there wasn’t enough schooling,” Dave Taylor says. The children attended school three hours a day and then were sent off to work on the farm.
It was there, however, that Dave Taylor learned to play basketball and other sports. He passed his knowledge along to his son, Mike Taylor, a standout athlete at Wilmington High School in the 1980s. His daughter, Lori Boggs, also went to Wilmington High School. 
Across the street from the orphanage in Lexington lived a family whose daughter had married Jim Mallory, who had played baseball for the Washington Senators, the New York Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals. 
“He was the smartest man in baseball, football or basketball I’ve ever known,” Dave Taylor says. After his stint in pro baseball, Mallory coached briefly at the Junior Children’s Home in Lexington, N.C., where his path crossed with Dave Taylor’s before landing a job at Elon College. 
Dave Taylor graduated in 1948 from the orphanage, and his former coach, Mallory, offered him the opportunity to play football at Elon College. Taylor spent two weeks there before deciding to head north instead. 
A buddy whose mother was working in Ohio had asked him what he was planning to do with his life. I said, “I don’t know — I still got my farm shoes,” but he ended up moving to Ohio to find work off the farm, at a General Motors plant in Dayton. 
He took a bus across the Ohio River and ate the first bowl of chili in his life; growing up in the orphanage, he had never had beef, but “plenty of milk, plenty of gravy.”
“We got an egg on Tuesday,” he says, “and a piece of pork on Sunday at noon.” 
Dave Taylor started off on the General Motors assembly line and worked his way up to general foreman, retiring in 1986.
He still has fond memories of both orphanages, and there were occasional trips back to the Biltmore, even after he and his siblings left in 1937. His father’s good friend Chauncey Beadle made sure that the children returned regularly to experience the wonders there, including visits to rooms not open to the public. The estate was their playground on those days.
The biggest highlight of the Biltmore visits was one shared in many of the stories of those who grew up there: the Biltmore Dairy. The rich ice cream from the Biltmore Dairy supposedly had the highest buttermilk content on the market.
“They let us run around and eat all the ice cream we wanted,” Dave Taylor says. It was a child’s dream fulfilled.
Four of the Taylor siblings, James, Robert, Mary and Helen, still live in North Carolina. The youngest, Helen, is 78 years old.
These days, Dave Taylor lives in a brick ranch in Wilmington, hoping to see family and revisit the Biltmore mansion as soon as he can. He spends time on a farm near Lynchburg, tending to gardens there, once again wearing his “farm shoes.”