Fred Loring Seely

Fred Loring Seely (December 22, 1871 – March 14, 1942) was a newspaperman, chemist, inventor and philanthropist.

Born to Uriah and Nancy Hopping Seely, in Monmouth, New Jersey, Fred Seely first worked for the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company and later became an executive for his father-in-law Edwin Wiley Grove's "Paris Medicine Company," a patent medicine business based in Tennessee. In 1906, with Mr. Grove's financial backing, Seely founded the Atlanta Georgian daily newspaper. He also took on many socially active causes, one of which was the exposure of chain gang labor practices in Georgia. State prisoners were being rented out for fifty cents a week, and many of these inmates received poor treatment at the hands of their temporary employers. Seely used his newspaper as a pulpit to broadcast the abuses of the chain-gang labor system. He was instrumental in helping to terminate this form of modern slave labor in Georgia. Many of his advertisers, however, had profited by using the prison laborers, and these well-to-do clients of The Atlanta Georgian were furious with Seely for his activism in this cause. They subsequently dropped their support for his newspaper, and this precipitated the sale of the paper to Randolph Hearst in 1912. After this, Seely went to North Carolina where in 1913 he built the Grove Park Inn with his father-in-law Edwin Wiley Grove. In 1917, he purchased Biltmore Estate Industries from Edith Vanderbilt and changed the name to Biltmore Industries, Inc.. The death of Mrs. Vanderbilt's husband and the great flood of the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers in 1916 (which submerged the original Biltmore Industries site) inspired the Vanderbilts to sell the enterprise. This small factory was primarily a home-spun wool weaving and woodworking business. Seely employed many deaf persons to work in his factory; two of his own siblings, in fact, were deaf. He also acted as the architect and builder of his home "Overlook" (sometimes called "Seely's Castle")on Sunset Mountain overlooking Asheville. After Seely's death in March 1942 in Asheville, North Carolina, his widow, Evelyn Grove Seely, moved to the Battery Park Hotel in downtown Asheville. In 1949 Mrs. Seely sold the expansive home to what would become Asheville-Biltmore College, the forerunner of what is now the University of North Carolina at Asheville. The college operated at the Sunset Mountain castle site until 1961.

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