By Eric Johnson

ASHEVILLE (March 6, 2025) – The Biltmore Estate is a vast and quirky enterprise, and it takes an incredible range of expertise to keep the place running. As I learned on a recent visit, a lot of that expertise comes from North Carolina’s public colleges and universities.

There is always intense debate about what kind of graduates North Carolina needs, and whether we should encourage more students to study the humanities, the sciences, business, or the arts.

A day at the Biltmore, a working estate with responsibilities ranging from forestry to fine art, reinforced that the answer is “all of the above” — especially when disaster strikes and people have to put their talents to new and urgent tasks.

Chase Pickering, the executive who leads guest experience for the Biltmore, took me on a daylong tour to see how one of the mountain region’s economic engines is weathering the recovery from Hurricane Helene.

Pickering is a descendant of the Vanderbilt family — he grew up on the estate, enjoying its 8,000 acres as a backyard playground — and now manages everything from house tours to historic preservation work.

The last few months have given him a crash course in disaster response, and he credited UNC Chapel Hill’s entrepreneurship program and courses in environmental studies for helping him manage rapid change at one of the country’s oldest family-owned businesses. Pickering graduated from Carolina in 2011.

I also met Bill Quade, the Biltmore’s Director of Horticulture, for a walk around the main entrance to the property. One of Quade’s many jobs this month is to replace the gorgeous tulip poplars that used to line the entryway to Biltmore’s gatehouse, a bit of magnificent landscaping designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and ruined by hurricane flooding. 

Poring over architectural drawings while trucks rumbled past, Quade talked about the challenge of repairing irrigation systems, finding suitably beautiful replacement trees, and deciding how to position them to preserve the grandeur of the original design.

And where does one get the confidence to walk in the footsteps of Olmsted, the guy who designed Central Park and invented landscape architecture as a discipline? Western Piedmont Community College followed by Western Carolina University, with degrees in horticulture and business administration.

“We do a lit bit of everything around here,” Quade said, before rushing off to debate the merits of a new entrance sign.

At lunch, I got to sit with Mark Hemphill, who spent his career rising through the Biltmore ranks to become the Chief Marketing Officer. It’s his job to keep people coming back to Asheville, to create a coherent story out of an iconic property where you can go hiking, drinking, river tubing, garden-strolling, or off-road driving, depending on your tastes.

“It’s such a fun challenge, finding ways to keep reinventing the experience,” Hemphill said. He’s an Asheville native, having made his first Biltmore visit on a school field trip before heading off to Appalachian State for an undergraduate degree in marketing and eventually an MBA from Carolina.

Finally, for an afternoon adventure, I went riding around with Kyle Mayberry, the estate’s Director of Agriculture, as he slogged up a muddy hillside in a company pickup.

For six years, Mayberry has overseen the hundreds of cattle, pigs, and sheep raised at Biltmore, and he recently got the monumental task of dealing with huge swatches of timber knocked over by Helene.

As he bounced over a rutted fire road, Mayberry explained how he’s working to negotiate contracts with sawmills and plan for years of careful replanting to keep the estate’s forests healthy.

“It’s going to be a good story out of a bad situation,” he said.

Mayberry got the job thanks to a mentor at NC State, where he earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in animal science. His predecessor at Biltmore was in the role for 35 years, and Mayberry hopes he can stick around until retirement, too. Tending to 8,000 acres of forest, farm, and animal pasture in the Blue Ridge Mountains is a dream job. 

Every day across this state, there are hundreds of thousands of public college graduates doing good and interesting work to keep our economy humming, keep basic services up and running, and make North Carolina a more interesting place to live. I don’t ever take it for granted.

Eric Johnson lives in Chapel Hill and works for the UNC System.