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Museum-Quality Restoration Complete, “Dixieland” Beckons Visitors To Retrace Footsteps Of The Gants And Wolfes, Hear Echoes Of Author’s Life And Fiction ASHEVILLE, N.C. (March 19, 2004) – Pause for a moment in the main hallway, close your eyes, and you can almost hear Oliver Gant crashing through the front door, ready to fling curses at Eliza for buying “Dixieland.” Upstairs, in the room where Ben Gant died, see the iron bed where Eugene’s brother spent his final days, and the big bay window that provided his last view of the world outside. Although Thomas Wolfe’s epic novel Look Homeward, Angel is unstintingly autobiographical, so richly rendered are the characters in the writer’s most famous work that it’s easy to forget Oliver Gant is really W.O. Wolfe, Eliza is his wife Julia, and Ben is Benjamin Harrison Wolfe, the author’s older brother who died in the devastating influenza epidemic of 1918. The details of Thomas Wolfe’s – Eugene’s – life and fiction come to life again at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, the writer’s boyhood home that has been completely restored following a devastating 1998 fire. The NC State Historic Site is scheduled to mark its Grand Reopening May 28-31, 2004, with a full slate of events celebrating the life and work of one of America’s greatest 20th-century authors. Built in 1883, the Queen Anne-style house was purchased by Wolfe’s mother Julia in 1906 and operated as the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse for four decades. Wolfe lived in the house from 1906 until 1916, when he left Asheville to pursue his undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By the time he left home, the boardinghouse had been expanded into the rambling, 6,000-square-foot, 29-room structure that readers of Look Homeward, Angel will recognize as “Dixieland.” Visitors
who are familiar with the book will enjoy “listening”
to the echoes of the fictional Gant family as they recall scenes
from the novel while touring the house. To enhance their enjoyment,
the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Here’s a sampling, along with updates on the impact of the fire and recently completed restoration: THE HOUSE: “It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middle-class street of small homes and boarding-houses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty, high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young deep-bodied maples …” “In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of Dixieland: its back end was built high off the ground on wet columns of rotting brick. …” “As the house filled, in the summer season, and it was necessary to wait until the boarders had eaten before a place could be found for him, he walked sullenly about beneath the propped back porch of Dixieland, savagely exploring the dark cellar, or the two dank windowless rooms which Eliza rented, when she could, to negresses.” (Look Homeward, Tourist update: After the 1998 fire, a detailed analysis of the 17 layers of exterior housepaint revealed that Old Kentucky Home was indeed painted yellow during the years that young Thomas Wolfe lived there. As part of the restoration, the house, which had been painted white for many years, was given a fresh coat of yellow paint. Other changes to the outside include a standing-seam copper porch roof and landscaping in the style of the period.) FRONT
HALLWAY: “Gant had already named it ‘The Barn’;
in the morning now, after his heavy breakfast at home, he would
swing gauntly toward town by way of Spring Street, composing enroute
the invective that he had formerly reserved to
his sitting-room. He would stride through the wide chill hall of
Dixieland, bursting in upon Eliza, and two or three negresses, busy
preparing the meal for the hungry boarders who rocked energetically
upon the porch. All of the objections, all of the abuse that had
not been uttered when she bought the place, were ELIZA’S ROOM: “At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark room with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. Her chamber was festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and string; stacks of old newspapers and magazines were piled in corners; and every shelf was loaded with gummed, labelled, half-filled medicine bottles. There was a smell in the air of mentholatum, Vick’s Pneumonia Cure, and sweet glycerine.” (Look Homeward, Tourist update: This is the room that Wolfe’s mother Julia had built for her own use during her 1916 renovations. Although smoke and water damage was widespread throughout the house following the 1998 fire, the restoration crew has successfully repaired the damage using state-of-the art restoration techniques. For example, nearly 4,000 square feet of original plaster was reattached to the walls of the house using a special two-part polymer adhesive.) DINING ROOM: “Daisy had been married in the month of June following Eliza’s purchase of Dixieland: the wedding was arranged on a lavish scale and took place in the big dining-room of the house. Gant and his two older sons grinned sheepishly in their unaccustomed evening dress, the Pentlands, faithful in their attendance at weddings and funerals, sent gifts and came. … Eugene remembered weeks of frantic preparation, dress fittings, rehearsals, the hysteria of Daisy, who stared at her nails until they went blue, and the final splendor of the last two days – the arriving gifts, the house, unnaturally cheerful with rich carpets and flowers, the perilous moment when their lives joined, the big packed dining-room, the droning interminable Scotch voice of the Presbyterian minister, the mounting triumph of the music when the grocery clerk got his bride.” (Look Homeward, Tourist update: The 1998 fire was started beneath the front window of the dining room, and it was by far the most heavily damaged room in the house. Although 200 Wolfe artifacts on display in the house were destroyed outright, another 600 were rescued by firefighters and other volunteers who rushed to the scene. The ornate Eastlake mantelpiece visitors will find in the dining room is a reproduction of the original, which was completely destroyed.) THE SLEEPING PORCH: “He went out and began to mount the dark stairs. Benjamin Gant, entering at this moment, stumbled across a mission-chair in the hall. He cursed fiercely, and struck at the chair with his hand. Damn it! Oh damn it! Mrs. Pert whispered a warning behind him, with a fuzzy laugh. Eugene paused, then mounted softly the carpeted stair, so that he would not be heard, entering the sleeping porch at the top of the landing on which he slept. … He lighted a cigarette, watching its red glowing suspiration in the mirror, and leaned upon the rail of his porch, looking out. Presently, he grew aware that Laura James, eight feet away, was watching him.” (Look Homeward, Tourist update: Like Eugene Gant returning from ‘Pulpit Hill’ in the novel, Thomas Wolfe did actually sleep on the sleeping porch when he returned home for the summer from college in Chapel Hill. The porch is enclosed by windows on the three exterior sides, and about half of the 300 panes of glass were shattered by the heat from the fire. The porch lies in the shadow of a towering sugar maple, perhaps a surviving representative of the young maples Wolfe wrote about in Look Homeward, Angel.) BEN’S ROOM: “’Ben’s in that room upstairs,’ Luke whispered, ‘where the light is.’” Eugene looked up with cold dry lips to the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian bay-window. It was next to the sleeping porch where, but three weeks before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage curse at life. The light in the sick room burned grayly, bringing to him its grim vision of struggle and naked terror.”
The Thomas Wolfe Memorial is part of the Historic Sites division of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources. It is located at 52 North Market Street in Asheville. Directions: From I-240 West, take the Merrimon Ave. exit (5A) and turn left at the stop light onto Merrimon Avenue. Turn left again at the stop light at the top of the hill onto Woodfin Street. Go one block and turn right on Market, proceed one-half block and the visitor center is on the left. The site operates on two seasonal schedules: April–October the site is open Tuesday-Saturday from 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Sunday from 1 p.m-5 p.m., and closed Monday. November–March the site is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sunday from 1 p.m.-4 pm., and closed Monday. Admission is $1 for adults and $0.50 for students. Contact
Site Manager Steve Hill at (828) 253-8304 or steve@wolfememorial.com
for additional information on the grand reopening. |
