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Clues Revealed By 1998 Fire Help Restoration Architects, Engineers Recreate 1916-Vintage ‘Old Kentucky Home’ of Famed Author’s Boyhood Memories ASHEVILLE, N.C. (March 19, 2004) – The first thing returning visitors to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial will notice is the fresh coat of pretty yellow paint adorning the home’s exterior. Until the 1998 fire that closed the author’s’ boyhood home to tours for more than five years, the house had been painted white. But like many interior and exterior features, the paint job didn’t truly represent the boardinghouse Wolfe lived in and later fictionalized in Look Homeward, Angel. Over the years, holes had been cut in baseboards to install heat registers. A porch roof on the back of the house had been covered with a black rubber membrane. Window shutters had been rendered inoperable, and period door and window hardware was missing. “The fire revealed a lot about the house that we didn’t know,” said Steve Hill, manager of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site. “We knew, for example, that the white on the exterior was not historically correct. After the fire, a detailed analysis of the 17 layers of paint showed that the house was painted yellow during the time Thomas Wolfe lived there.” Guided by historians and a team of renowned restoration architects and engineers, work crews have spent the past 2-1/2 years reconstructing the rambling, 6,000-square-foot structure. In addition to their remarkable success in preserving much of the building’s original materials, they have corrected or eliminated some modern and historically inaccurate alterations that had accumulated over the course of several decades. With the opportunity to make the Wolfe Memorial more historically consistent, the restoration task force decided to recreate the house as it was in 1916.That’s a significant year in the history of the 1883 structure because it was the young Wolfe’s final year at home before going off to college, and it’s also the year Wolfe’s mother Julia expanded the boardinghouse for the last time, adding 11 rooms to the 18-room house. Restoration architect Joseph K. Oppermann had clear marching orders when he began work on the project. “I told Joe, ‘When you get done here, I don’t even want to know you were ever here,’” said Hill. Some compromises were unavoidable – for example, smoke alarms and a sprinkler system had to be installed to meet state requirements and, hopefully, prevent another fire. Electrical conduits next to the chimney in the kitchen are another telltale sign of the smoke detection system. And in some rooms, narrow, less obtrusive vents for the heating and air conditioning have been installed in the ceilings. But the goal was to bring the house back to a condition that was as authentic as possible. Preservation of the original plaster walls was one of the most challenging aspects of the restoration. In many places, whole sections of plaster had cracked from the heat and water damage and peeled away from the wood lath that attached it to the wall. On other walls, segments of plaster had to be removed temporarily to install the water pipes for the fire suppression system. In all, over 4,000 square feet of original plaster was saved using a two-part polymer adhesive that, when injected through small three-eighths-inch-thick holes, draws the plaster segments back to the lath and reattaches them. Similar painstaking care has been taken with other aspects of the restoration. For example, the roof, which collapsed into the house as a result of the fire, has been recreated exactly as it was during Wolfe’s boyhood. Roofing specialists used archival photos of the Wolfe home to match every detail of the old slate shingle roof in color and design. For the roof over the front porch, a standing-seam copper roof with triple-locked seams was hand-crafted on site. Old tin and aluminum gutters were replaced with copper, considered more appropriate to the era. In downstairs rooms of the house, some hardwood floors buckled from the intense heat of the fire and had to be replaced. But the floors in many rooms, many of them milled from heart pine lumber, survived and have been sanded down and refinished. Wallpaper treatments consistent with the period will eventually be installed in appropriate rooms. However, the finish treatment on walls throughout much of the house will be “the flimsy rough plastering” that Wolfe described in Look Homeward, Angel. Period door and window hardware has been installed where hardware was missing. Restorers also removed non-period registers that had been installed in baseboards throughout the house. Once the registers were removed, carpenters used special techniques to repair the baseboards and eliminate any hint they had ever been tampered with. Outside, landscaping of the yard will also reflect the period as much as possible. Of course, the “young maples” Wolfe described in his epic novel are either gone or grown to maturity, as is the case with the sugar maple that towers over the second-floor sleeping porch where Wolfe often stayed on his visits home from Chapel Hill. Most final details of the restoration project will be completed in time for the Grand Reopening of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site, scheduled for May 28-31, 2004. 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 East, take the Merrimon Ave. exit (5A). Go straight through the stop light onto Market Street. Go one-half block; the visitor center is on the left. 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. |
