Biltmore Just Didn’t Measure Up
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
It’s a Wagner Week! We start with one of the most spectacular run-on sentences I’ve come across in the whole letter collection. The sentence even ends with a pondering about endings. This girl is also the only person I’ve ever come across who was not impressed with the Biltmore estate. I also learned a new idiom: air castle.
Rome, Georgia
Wednesday
November 25, 1903
Dear Jesse,
You are a darling to want me with you anytime and I wish so much it had been so I could be with you this month but when your letter came I was entertaining a friend from Aniston, one of the dearest girls I ever saw and had made me promise to go with her to help keep her sisters children for two weeks so here I am and have been for 10 days having the loveliest time in the world and hate so much to wind my way towards the city of B-ham on Friday but all good things come to an end. I’ll remember this invitation and if you will let me, shall come the very next time I am in Tupelo.
May I, dear? I think it would be lovely for you to come up and stay with me while I’m there and let me go home with you, how about such an air castle? Know you never saw a girl who could build more.
I’m going to be so busy when I do get home but it has been nearly 2 months since I have done anything else except entertain company or be entertained.
I had such a glorious day yesterday. Went 4 miles into the country to spend the day with a friend who lives in a beautiful old house that is all furnished in old mahogany, every fireplace has great big brass andirons and such cheerful wood fires, all this I dearly love. Then after dinner we went hickory nut hunting. I sure did hate to come home but there is to be a card party given to us this afternoon at three so back we had come.
The trip father and I took this summer will it bore you to listen to me a little while on the subject? Well, we never did get to the seashore much to my disappointment at the time. I never did want to go anywhere so much in all my life.
After we could not go to the seashore, decided to try mountain air so we went to Blowing Rock, N.C. Of course you have seen far more beautiful things but to a little country girl like myself, it was grand. I never tired of looking at the mountains and the air was simply lovely. We walked from morning until night, some days would go 10 miles. On our way home we spent two days in Asheville to be able to see Biltmore, but I must say the scenery did not come up to that we had left.
You need never fear that your letter is too gay. Enjoy every word of them and I’m willing to let you have one of my bad spellings and all for the pleasure of hearing from Jess once again so don’t make me wait so long “between drinks” but write real soon to me who thinks you’re a fun girl and send lots of love and I will always be lovingly,
May
