Your brief report of the 23rd instant is received. An occasional informal note such as this supplies would be very useful, helping us to feel that we are more closely en rapport with you than we otherwise could be.

About gravel, I remind you that we have often and strongly urged that all practicable search should be pressed for good gravel beds, and, failing to find them, experiments should be pushed with a view to obtaining the best practicable artificial substitutes. We have never received a report from you or anyone else on the Estate indicating that the urgency of our wishes in this respect have been {appreciated}. The lack of satisfactory gravel is to be constantly looked upon as the most important defect of the Estate. It would be worth many thousand dollars to get even a little the better of it. There is nothing to be hoped for in the future that would add as much to the value of Mr. Vanderbilt’s property as the discovery within transportable distance of it of a bed of gravel like that at Royer Hook, which we came upon some years after we began work on the Central Park, meantime having been using other gravel which was not of one quarter the value relative to cost, though its cost to us was much greater. A million dollars would not have been too much for New York to have paid for the discovery of that bed, and a discovery of anything like it within one hundred miles of Biltmore would be worth more to Mr. Vanderbilt than anything that can now be done for him. There is today nothing on the Estate nearly as unsatisfactory to us as the lack of good gravel. Every bit of gravel walk that we have is very, very, very bad compared with what it is perfectly reasonable for us to hope may be secured. The road surface material which we are using is still more unfortunate. The discovery of a bed of gravel anything like that at Sing Sing, within one hundred miles by rail of Asheville, would be worth many thousand dollars, and search for it should be constantly and indefatigably pushed now and hereafter. Nothing else that Mr. Boynton can do; no discovery of plants that can be made, will have a fraction of the value to Mr. Vanderbilt that a discovery of a good bed of gravel might have. This simply because such a discovery would greatly increase the value of every tree and bush, in fact, of everything on the Estate. The whole Biltmore investment would rise in value if a good gravel bed could be found anywhere in Eastern Tennessee or Western North Carolina. The very first memorandum that I made after arriving on the Estate was: “Search for gravel,” and I fear that my last will be a repetition of it. There is nothing in the geological conditions, as far as I understand them, that make us despair of such a discovery, and I [938]sometimes question if it would not pay Mr. Vanderbilt to employ a special geological expert for a year or two exclusively in search of it. At any rate there is before us no problem of such importance as that of finding some better road and walk surface material than we have. I have had this conviction and have urged it from the very day of my first visit to the Estate, and there is nothing in the {history} of the work since that has been as disappointing to me as {the failure} to find gravel. I cannot believe that as much has yet {been done} for this purpose as there should have been. We have {not yet} had the first response from you or from anyone else on {the Estate} to all that we have written and said upon the subject, {and I} am in danger of thinking that my anxiety about it is not {attended} to. From my first visit the question has given me more {anxiety} than anything and everything else.

Yours Truly

Please show this note to Mr Beadle and confer with him as to the employment of Mr Boynton to search for gravel &c. It must be considered that this is now the most important question of the Estate. Let no effort or painstaking be thought too much to spend in advancing a satisfactory conclusion. I have from my first visit found that it might prove so and every year’s experience confirms my anxiety. You must be thorough in dealing with it.