Thomas Wolfe Memorial

This Queen Anne-style Victorian house, originally called "The Old Kentucky Home," was the childhood home of author Thomas Wolfe and immortalized in his novel "Look Homeward, Angel." His mother Julia ran it as a boardinghouse starting in 1906.

The Thomas Wolfe Memorial at 52 North Market Street in Asheville preserves the boardinghouse where one of America's great novelists grew up and which he immortalized as Dixieland in his 1929 novel Look Homeward, Angel. The house was built in 1883, and in 1906, Thomas's mother Julia Wolfe purchased the property and converted it into a boardinghouse she called the Old Kentucky Home. Julia ran the business with relentless determination, filling every available room with travelers, salesmen, and visitors seeking the mountain air. Young Thomas grew up surrounded by strangers in his own home, an experience that profoundly shaped his writing and his restless personality. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971.

The Wolfe family's connection to the house is marked by loss. In October 1918, during the devastating influenza epidemic that swept through Asheville, Thomas's beloved older brother Ben fell ill. He was nursed in an upstairs bedroom with lace curtains, where the family kept vigil as his condition deteriorated. Ben died in that room, a tragedy that Thomas would transform into one of the most powerful scenes in Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas himself would die in 1938 at the age of thirty-seven from miliary tuberculosis, never returning to the house that had defined his childhood.

Julia Wolfe continued to live in and operate the boardinghouse until her death in 1945 at the age of eighty-five, having outlived her famous son by seven years. Staff and visitors to the memorial report that both mother and son have returned to the place they could never quite leave in life. Thomas's ghost has been spotted in a rocking chair in the upstairs rooms, sitting quietly as though lost in thought. Julia's spirit is seen most frequently in the dining room area, the heart of any boardinghouse, where she spent decades managing meals for her guests. Visitors describe catching a glimpse of a woman in period dress at the dining table who vanishes when approached directly.

Photographs taken inside the memorial have produced unexplained images -- what appears to be the back of Julia's head near the dining room, lace curtains being pulled back by unseen hands in the room where Ben died, and a figure that some interpret as Thomas peering around a corner. A photograph of Julia that sits in the house has reportedly tipped itself over on occasions when visitors say something she would not have approved of, as though the strong-willed matriarch is correcting her guests from beyond the grave.

The Thomas Wolfe Memorial is operated by the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites and is open for guided tours. Visitors come to walk through the rooms that shaped one of the twentieth century's most autobiographical novelists and to see the boardinghouse exactly as it was during the era Julia filled it with strangers. Whether her spirit continues to manage the house, and whether Thomas has finally come home to the place he wrote about with such aching ambivalence, are questions the memorial's guides leave to each visitor to decide for themselves.