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'l."l--G1AS IDLFE AND THE OW KENTUCKY HGm Vol. I. }o)y~ Wilson Angley STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA Department of Cultural Resources Raleigh 27611 December I ~ 1975 James E. Holshouser, Jr. Governor .Grace J. Rohrer Secretary LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Division of Archives and History Larry E. Tise, Director The attached report on the Thomas Wolfe Memor ial State Historic Site w.as written by Mr . Wilson Angley, a candidate for the Ph . D. degree in b.ts.tory at The University of North Carol ina. Mr . Angley worked In excess of 720 bours on this report in the summer and fa I I of 1975. Th ~s Is to cert tfy that b.e has complied with alI of the terms of the agreement under wnlcn the report was compiled . It is as complete as funds and time permitted. A word of caution is extended to the reader concerning the transcribed documents inc luded in Appendix M. These t ranscriptions were ta ken from copies of poor quality microfi lm. They should be compared with the orlgtnal documents. in the Buncombe County Courthouse for accuracy. While I think Mr . Ang ley d i d a most doubt, additions and corrections to this of such observations so that they may be the report. commendable job , there wl l I be , no document . Please send to me coptes includ:;;e272-J ~orical Research Supervisor HISTORICAL RESEARCH REPORT THOMAS WOLFE AND THE OLD KENTUCKY HOME by Wilson Angley October 30, 197 5 Raleigh, North Carolina - TABLE OF CONTENTS I. THOMAS WOLFE AND THE OLD KENTUCKY HOME A. Text B. Footnotes C. Bibliography II. APPENDIXES A. List of Contents of the Old Kentucky Home prepared October 1 , 1919 B. Inventory To Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association, From the Heirs of Thomas Wolfe and Julia E. Wolfe , As of Date , May 3, 1949 C. Thomas Wolfe Memorial, Inventory - August 13, 1974 D. List of Thomas Wo l fe's personal property on Storage at MAMMOTH STORAGE WAREHOUSE, INC. - 410 - EAST 54th Str eet - NEW YORK CITY E . Miscellaneous Volumes from Library of W. 0 . WOLFE F . Books in the Wolfe Home Belonging to Various Members of the Wolfe Family G. Partial List of Other Boarding Houses on North Spruce Street from 1906 to 1916 H. Selected Bibliography of Wolfe's Published Writings I . THOMAS WOLFE HOUSE CITATIONS FROM LOOK HOMEWARD , ANGEL J. Miscellaneous Notes on Specit~c Items K. GeneralAssembly of North Carolina, 1973 Session , Senate Bill 1046: "An Act Appropriating Funds for the Establishment of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial as a State Historic Site." L . Exhibits M. Deeds 1. J. M. Israel toW. 0. Wolfe (1881), Buncombe County Deeds, 2. 3. 4. 5. 6 . 7. 8 . 9. 10. 11. Book 41, pp. 371-372 E. Sluder toT. Van Gilder (1881), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 41, pp. 392-393 T. Van Gilder to E. Sluder (1882), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 41, pp . 406 - 407 E. Sluder to C. Barnard (1884), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 46, pp. 183-185 W. W. Barnard to J. H. Herring (1884), Buncombe County Deeds , Book 46, pp. 361- 363 J. H. Herring to C. Barnard (1885), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 48, pp . 98 - 99 W. 0. Wolfe to J. Wolfe (1886), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 74, pp. 216 - 217 W. W. Barnard to A. J. Reynolds (1887), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 68 , pp . 206-208 C. V. Reynolds toT . M. Myers (1900), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 112, p. 543 T. M. Myers to J. Wolfe (1906), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 147, pp. 402-404 W. 0. Wolfe to J. R. Durrett (1920), Buncombe County Deeds , Book 237, p. 245. • TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued) 12. W. 0 . Wolfe toP. R. Moale (1920), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 242, p. 244 13. J . Wolfe to H. Blomberg (1926), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 374, pp. 543-548 14. J. Wolfe to Wachovia Bank (1927), Living Trust Agreement 15. J. Wolfe to Wachovia Bank (1927), Buncombe County Deeds , Book 377, p. 70 16. R. Kitchen to Wachovia Bank (1939), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 519, pp. 35- 36 . 17 . Wachovia Bank to H. Blomberg (1941), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 541, pp . 35 - 36 18 . H. Blomberg to J . Wolfe, et al. (1942), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 54 1 , pp. 521- 522 19. F. Wo l fe, e t a l. to J . Wolfe (1944) , Buncombe County Deeds , Book 565, pp. 51 0 - 513 20 . F. Wolfe, et al. to Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association (1949), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 671, pp. 285 - 288 21 . F. Wolfe, et al. to Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association (1949), Bailment Agreement 22 . Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association to City of Asheville (1958), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 798, p. 562 23. City of Asheville to State of North Carolina (1 975), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 1114, pp. 421-424 In the old house of time and silence there is something that creaks forever in the night, something that moves and creaks forever, and that never can be still.l And all of it is as it has always been: again, again, I turn, and find again the things that I have always known: the cool sweet magic of the starred mountain night, the huge attentiveness of dark, the slope, the street, the trees, the living silence of the houses waiting, and the fact that April has come back again • • • and again, again, in the old house I feel beneath my tread the creak of the old stair, the worn rail , the white-washed walls, the feel of darkness and the house asleep , and think, 'I was a child here; here the stairs, and here the darkness; this was I, and here is Time . ' 2 Thomas Wolfe's "house of time and silence" now commemorates the author whose life and art it so forcibly and endurably shaped . Eventu-ally Wolfe was to take upon himself the Herculean labor of translating this country ' s entire experience into prose , of capturing the very es-sence of America. Inevitably he failed to ach~evethis goal , but not be-fore having established for himself a permanent place among the foremost ranks of American writers, many of whose goals had also proven impossible of attainment : ••• among his and my contemporaries, I rated Wolfe first because we had all failed, but Wolfe made the best failure because he tried t he hardest to say the most •••• Man has but one short life to write in, and there is so much to be said, and of course he wants to say it all before he dies. My admiration for Wolfe is that he tried his best to get it all said; he was willing to throw away style, coherence, all the rules of preciseness, to try to put all the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin as it were . 3 But Wolfe never succeeded so well as when writing of his youth and of growing up in Asheville. When, in his writing, he departed from the Asheville setting and the recollections of his boyhood there, something of vividness, cohesion , and structure was surrendered. He never quite equa led Look Homeward, Angel, in which he poured forth the memories of his youth in a rich lyrical p r ose, replete with vivid sensory images . In his later work 1 he returned again and again to the scenes of his youth, and when he did so his work was the better for it: Wolfe was a man of tremendous powers of memory; it was his chief artistic resource. It made possible Look Homeward, Angel. But it was also his chief limitation. When his memory failed to provide him with both the raw material and the perspective for the work of art, the result was empty, lifeless prose.4 Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe 's editor at Scribner's and the man to whom Wolfe was most deeply indebted as a writer, realized the crucial molding influence of his early years: I think no one could understand Thomas Wolfe who had not seen or properly imagined the place in which he was born and grew up. Asheville, N.C. is encircled by mountains . The trains wind in and out through labyrinths of passes. A boy of Wolfe's imagination imprisoned there could think that what was beyond was all wonderful - different from what it was where there was not for him enough of anything. . • • • . . Wolfe was in those mountains - he tells of the train whistles at night - the trains were winding their way out into the great world where it seemed to the boy there was everything desirable, and vast, and wonderful. It was partly that which made him want to see everything, and read everything, and say everything . S Wolfe's youth was centered around two very different houses in Ashe- 2 ville: the one at 92 Woodfin Street where all the Wolfe children were born, the other at 48 Spruce Street which his mother operated as a boarding house and which Wolfe would later inunortalize as "Dixieland." Both houses were important in shaping Wolfe's personality, character, and work. Of the first something should be said because it exists no longer, of the second much must be said for it now stands as a memorial to his achievements. The Old Kentucky Home, now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, is situated on a plot of land linked to the very beginnings of the City of Asheville. On July 7, 1794 the prominent miller, John Burton, received a grant of land from the State of North Carolina for some two hundred acres in Buncombe County known as the "Town Tract." The boundaries of this original grant relate in the following way to the present-day city: the northern boundary ex-tended along a line from Charlotte Street, near its intersection with Clayton Street, westward [Sondley inadvertently says eastward] along Orange Street to a point east of Broadway [formerly North Main], thence southward to approximately Coxe Avenue, thence eastward to the eastern extremity of Atkin Street, and finally northward to Charlotte Street and 6 the beginning again. Thus the future Spruce Street and site of the Old Kentucky Home were embraced within the boundaries of the original grant to the "founder of Asheville," upon which the nucleus of the city was constructed. By 1840 Asheville had grown but little. The entire eastern portion of 3 the city, bounded on the west by North and South Main Streets [now Broadway and Biltmore Avenue], on the north by Woodfin Street and on the south by the southern boundary, boasted a mere eight residences, excluding slave quarters . Nearly the whole of this area of about three hundred acres was owned by James McConnell Smith, James W. Patton, Montraville Patton, Dr. 7 J. F. E. Hardy, Mrs. Rose Morrison, and Thomas L. Gaston. The immediate vicinity of the Old Kentucky Home seems to have belonged to James McConnell Smith and to have contained no private dwellings at all: Beginning at the corner of Woodfin Street, Mr. J. M. Smith ran up to the public square and back to Spruce Street and with it to Woodfin Street, owning all in this block, upon which there was no building save the old Buck Hotel and its belongings and one small two room frame dwellin§ about where Mr. Jenkins' store on North Main now [1905] stands . James McConnell Smith was born at the future site of Asheville on June 14, 1787, the son of Colonel Daniel S~th and Mary Davidson Smith. I He is believed to have been the first white child born in North Carolina west of the Blue Ridge. In 1814 he married Mary ("Polly") Patton, daughter of Colonel John Patton of Swannanoa. Smith throve in a nunber of business ventures in Asheville in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century and was the holder of extensive lands in Asheville, Buncombe County, and Georgia. He built and kept the old Buck Hotel, maintained a store and tanyard, ran several farms in the Asheville area, managed a ferry on the French Broad River, and later constructed and operated the county's first bridge over that stream. Until his demise on May 18, 1856 at the age of sixty-eight, Smith enjoyed the status of one of Asheville's wealthiest and most prominent citizens . 9 By 1881 the land upon which the Old Kentucky Home now stands was owned by one Erwin Sluder, a banker. By an indenture dated October 4 of that year Sluder and his wife, the former Julia A. Shepherd, conveyed a 4 large lot on Spruce Street to a prominent Asheville hardware merchant, Thomas Van Gilder, for $800. 10 Almost exactly a year later, on October 3, 1882, Sluder repurchased one half of this property from Van Gilder, leaving each in possession of identical lots on Spruce Street measuring ninety- five by 11 one hundred and ninety feet. It is on the lot repurchased by Sluder that the Old Kentucky Home now stands. Between Sluder's repurchase of October 3, 1882 and his subsequent sale of the property on January 13, 1884 , the pur- 12 chase price increased from $400 to $3 , 500. Almost certainly then the original house was erected in 1883. At the time the bouse was constructed, Asheville was a remote settle-ment of 3,874 people, 2,408 o f whom were white, 1,466 Negro . Five general merchandise stores c lustered about Courthouse or Public Square [now Pack Square]. The Bank of Asheville was the city's only such institution . The professions were represented by twenty-six attorneys, seven dentists, and eleven physicians. There were some thirty-eight streets, usually passable. Already Asheville accomodated its small but budding toutl$ttrade in six modest hotels . The city's moral and religious instruction was carried on in nine houses of worship (six white, three Negro) and in seven schools of various description. Asheville ' s Board of Trade, the future Chamber of 13 Commerce, had been in existence scarcely a year. By the early 1880s the stage was already being set for Asheville ' s 5 development as a major tourist and health resort. During much of the nine-teenth century Asheville had remained a remote and almost inaccessible mountain settlement . As early as 1795 a crude wagon road had been completed from the south through Saluda Gap to Asheville and on to the west and Knox- . 11 14 v1 e. A second road, dating from the early nineteenth century, proceeded northwestward from the Public Square along North Main Street, across the French Broad and into Tennessee. 15 These and other early roads to follow, however, were passable to only the most stalwart, long- suffering, and deter-mined of men. The completion then of the Buncombe Turnpike in 1827 from Saluda northward through Asheville, Warm Springs [now Hot Springs], and into Tennessee at Paint Rock was considered a major achievement in road- 16 building and considerably increased travel through western North Carolina. Between the completion of the Buncombe Turnpike and the advent of the railroads in the 1880s, prodigious droves of livestock and poultry were driven on foot southward from Tennessee and Kentucky through Buncombe, bound for markets in South Carolina and Georgia. Buncombites throve in supplying feed and accomodations to the migratory hordes of men and ani- 17 mals. They would soon turn their endeavors toward a more refined clientele. 6 Since soon after the turn of the nineteenth century , a trickle of summer visitors had begun to make their way from South Carolina and Geor-gia to the Asheville and Warm Springs areas in search of comfort and recreation. By 1820 Asheville was also gaining celebrity as a health resort , particularly for consumptives. The numbers of both the vaca-tioners and the migrant ailing were swelled appreciably by completion f h B b T . k 18 o t e uncom e urnp~ e. It was the advent of rail travel in the 1880s, however, which enabled Asheville to become a major resort and health center . At the close of the Civil War, Asheville had stood sixty miles distant from railheads in Morgan-ton, North Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina, and Greeneville, Tennessee. The long-delayed Western North Carolina Railroad from Salisbury through Statesville, Morganton, and Old Fort, finally broke through to Asheville in 1880. Connections with the south followed in 1886 with the completion of 19 the Asheville-Spartanburg line. Among other developments, the opening of the Battery Park Hotel in 1886 and the completion of George W. Vander-built's palacial Biltmore House in 1895 signaled Asheville's triumphant ar-rival on the social and financial scene, and set in motion forces of growth and change which would not spend themselves until the late 1920s. Several of those associated with the future Old Kentucky Home played significant parts in laying the financial and mercantile foundations for a growing Asheville; others, like Julia E. Wo l fe, who followed them, opened its doors to the rapidly increasing numbers flocking to Asheville in search of health and recreation . Among the former was Erwin Sluder, the man who erected the original house on Spruce Stre~t . His gravestone in Asheville~s Riverside Cemetery indicates that he lived from 1824 to 1885. By the time of the housets construction he had long since established himself as one of western North Carolina\s lead~g p~~y~te bankers, haying set up for busi- 20 ness on the Public Square soon after the Civil war. The Census of 1880 listed Sluder as a banker, age fifty-six , with four children. Listed as members of his household were, besides his immediate family, a niece, two 21 boarders (a teacher and a dentist), and two servants. In 1884 he took as his partner W. W. Barnar d . 22 Barnard was Sluder ' s son- in-law , the husband of his eldest child Cordelia (Cordie) . 23 On January 13, 1884 Sluder sold the property on Spruce Street to his 24 daughter and son-in-law for $3,500. Apparently, however, the couple had been living in the house since its completion, as indicated by Asheville's first City Directory, published in October of 1883. 25 Erwin Sluder's residence , on the other hand, was given as North Main Street in 1883. 26 Very probably Sluder never resided in the house he had built. By 1883 he was a prominent Asheville citizen in the fifty-ninth year of his age with a well established household; his daughter, Cordie, according to the Census of 1880, would have been nineteen the year the house was built; and it was the Barnards , not the Sluder s, who were listed as residents of Spruce Street in 1883. It is reasonable to suppose , then, that the house was built for the newly married couple by Erwin Sluder and sold to them the following January shortly before his death. 7 W. W. Barnard (1858-1944) 27 was a leading buyer and warehouseman during Asheville's thriving tobacco marketing period in the 1880s. 28 Having been made a partner in his father-in-law's banking concern in 1884, he continued to prosper in that profession after Sluder ' s death the following year . By 1890 he had risen to the vice-presidency of the National Bank of Asheville, and from 1892 to 1896 served as president of that bank. 29 Barnard and his wife possessed the property until April 1: 1884, when, for some reason, 30 they sold the house to one J. H. Herring for $3,600. Of Herring little can be learned except that in 1887 he was carrying on a trade in shoes and boots in the Herring and Weaver Shoe Store at 30 South Main Street . 31 After less than a year, on March 14, 1885, Herring relinquished the house 32 to Cordie Barnard for $3,390 . By 1890 Herring vanished from the city directories, presumably having died or moved away. From March 14, 1885 until July 13, 1889 the house remained in the Barnards' hands. The City Directory of 1887 indicates that, after the death of Erwin Sluder, several members of his family moved into the Spruce 33 Street house with the Barnards. The next change of ownership came with the Barnards' sale of the house to Mrs. Alice Johnston Reynolds, a widow, on July 13, 1889 for the muchincreased purchase price of $7,500. 34 It should be noted that the original house had apparently seen a massive addition during the period of the Barnards' residence, the price of the house having more than doubled between 1885 and 1889. It was during the period of Mrs. Reynolds' ownership that the house definitely began to be operated as a boarding house . Within one year after her purchase, the City Directory of 1890, in the classified ads, listed the residence as a boarding house '~y permission . " 35 Under Mrs. Reynolds' personal proprietorship and that of others to whom she apparently leased the house, 48 Spruce Street took in boarders from 1890 to 1900. An 1893 information booklet for the promotion of tourism contained a glowing advertisement for Mrs. Reynolds' boarding house. 36 Three years later, though still referred to as the Reynolds, the house was accepting board-ers under the proprietorship of Mrs. Leah I. Drake, whose advertise- 8 • ment was inserted in the City Directory of 1896. 37 Subsequent proprietors during the period of Mrs. Reynolds' ownership were Mrs. W. 0 . Hudson in 189938 and Mrs. Mollie C. Wadsworth in 1900. 39 By July of 1900 Mrs. Reynolds had died·; her brother, Dr . Carl V. Reynolds, acting in the capacity of executor of her estate, sold the house on the twenty seventh day of that month to the Reverend Thomas M. 40 Myers and his long-suffering wife, Mary, for $5,000. At the ti.me of this transaction, Dr. Reynolds was carrying on his medical practice in the Barnard Building in Asheville. 41 He subsequently went on to distinguish 42 himself in the practice of medicine on both the local and state levels. The Reverend T. M. Myers, from whom Julia Wolfe was to purchase the Old Kentucky Home, seems to have been a colorful and restless man with more than three decades in the service of God to his credit . Re was, however, flawed by a propensity for strong drink and by a dubious mental constitution, at least in his declining years . Mrs. Wolfe later recalled that he was A man from Kentucky . He was a lecturer , a Campbellite preacher [he is sometimes remembered, with less likelihood , as having been a Methodist], and a very brainy man at one time, but he 43 snapped several times they said, and had to go to an institution. In August of 1898, two years before his purchase of the Spruce Street property, the Reverend Myers purchased a large farm near Asheville which he dubbed the "Old Kentucky Home," the name he would soon after confer on the boarding house. 44 For reasons best known to himself, Foster A. Sondley re-corded the Reverend Myers' undistinguished exclamation alone, of all those 9 which must have found voice on that day in 1887, when Asheville's first elec-tric street railway car lurched forward, aided by neither animal nor steam power, on its maiden journey from the Public Square southward to Biltmore. 45 Wolfe later drew the Reverend Myers' portrait as the "Reverend Wellington Hodge" in Look Homeward, Angel, making mention of some of the haunting memo-ries which Myers had of the Old Kentucky Home and which helped motivate his sale of the house to Mrs. Wolfe. 46 The Old Kentucky Home was operated by several proprietors during the six years of Myers" ownership. In 1900, the year of Myers' purchase of the house and the year of Thomas Wolfe's birth, 10 the proprietor was Mrs. Mollie C. Wadsworth. 47 In August of 1902 Myers leased the house to one C. J. Jeffress for $900 with an option to buy.48 In 1904 Edward T. and Mary B. Green were acting as proprietors; 49 and in 1906, the year of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase, Thomas W. and Elsie C. King kept the house for boarders. 50 For more than two decades after the construction of their future house on Spruce Street, the Wolfe residence was located a short distance away at 92 Woodfin Street. Some account must be given of the Woodfin Street house, for it was there that all of the Wolfe children were born, it was there that the Wolfes' family life most nearly approached congeniality and cohesiveness, and it was there that Thomas Wolfe's fondest memories of childhood originated. The man who was to build the Woodfin Street house with his own hands, William Oliver Wolfe, was born near York Springs, Pennsylvania on April 10, 1851, the son of Jacob Wolf (W. 0. later added the "e") and the former Eleanor Jane Heikes (or Heikus). Shortly after the Civil War, he had struck out for Baltimore, where he had found employment with Sisson and King's Monument Works. During the years of his apprenticeship, Wolfe lived in a Baltimore boarding house, the Streeter Hotel, from whose irascible proprietor, Joe Streeter, he may have acquired some of his relishment for the hyperbolic, the dramatic, and the profane. Upon completion of his apprenticeship in Baltimore, the stone cutter came south with his younger brother, Elmer, to work on the column friezes of the capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina. In something under a year, the work completed, the two moved northward to Raleigh, where they applied their craft to the construction of the state insane asylum and other buildings currently under way. By 1871 his brother Elmer had departed for Ohio, and W. 0. Wolfe had established his own place of business in Raleigh at the corner of South Blount and East Morgan Streets. On October 9, 1873, the twenty- two year old Wolfe and a nineteen year old Raleigh girl, Hattie Watson, were joined in wedlock. Of this, the first of Wolfets three ill-fated marriages, little can be learned, save that it soon ended in divorce . In 1879 Wolfe married Cynthia Hill, the daughter of his landlady and eight years his senior. Shortly thereafter, during theLr first year of marriage, Cynthia's worsening tubercular condition resolved the couple to leave Raleigh and take up residence in Asheville. Arriving in Asheville some time before her husband, Cynthia Wolfe set up as a milliner. W. 0. 51 followed as soon as his business affairs in Raleigh were settled. The Census of 1880, besides W. 0 . and Cythia Wolfe, lists his mother-in- law, Mrs. Allen, his brother Wesley, a plasterer, and one Negro servant as members of theW. 0. Wolfe household. 52 Julia Wolfe would later recall that W. 0. and Cynthia Wolfe had lived briefly in two rented rooms on North Main Street before construction of the Woodfin Street house. 53 The information in the Census of 1880, however, indicates that larger quarters must have been occupied at that ttme. In any event, W. 0 . and Cynthia Wolfe seem to have been unable to 11 • locate a house which suited them, and decided to purchase a piece of land and erect their own house . On October 10, 1881 W. 0. Wolfe purchased the lot on Woodfin Street from J. M. and S. E. Israel for $300. 54 With the help of several men whom he had hired, Wolfe completed the building of the house soon after purchase of the land. But Cynthia Wolfe's health did not improve as hoped. After less than three years in the house her husband had built for her, she passed away on February 22, 1884. 55 During the brief period that Cynthia Wolfe operated her millinery shop in Asheville , she bacame acquainted with Julia Elizabeth Westall, the future Julia E. Wolfe. Indeed, it was in Cynthia ' s shop that the future marriage partners first met. Sometime thereafter, probably in the summer of 1884, a more serious acquaintance was set on foot when the redoubtable stone cutter was accosted in his shop by Miss Westall, a school teacher and part- time bookseller, in search of a new customer. Julia E. Westall had been born at Swannanoa in 1860, the product of Major Thomas Casey Westall's second marriage . She was almost entirely self-educated in her early youth, having received little or no formal schooling on the primary and secondary levels. After a year and a half's attendance at Asheville Female College and Judson College in Hendersonville, she was able to establish herself as a rural school teacher in Yancey and later Mitchell counties 9 and supplemented her income by selling books during the summer . 56 Thus the union which would one day produce one of America~s great novelists was begun on a basis of buying, selling, lending, and discussing books. Mrs. Wolfe later recalled that her future husband had initiated his proposal, in the parlor of the Woodfin Street house, by explaining 12 • 13 that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Allen, was soon to return to Raleigh and that he was therefore obliged either to remarry or break up housekeeping for want of assistance. Wolfe's pragmatic solution was not immediately accepted, but at length his presumption and persistence won her over. On January 14, 1885, at the home of the bride's father, the two were joined in holy matri- 57 mony. It was to prove , as Andrew Turnbull so aptly described it, "an epic misalliance."58 A numerous progeny soon began to issue forth. The first child, Leslie, a girl who died in infancy , was born October 18, 1885, only nine months and four days after the wedding. Seven other children and numerous miscarriages followed, all placing in extreme jeopardy the allegation of impotency report- 59 edly leveled at W. 0. Wolfe by his first wife, Hattie Watson. Like Lesl ie before them, all the Wolfe children were born in Julia Wolfe's upstairs bedroom at the front of the house: Effie on June 7, 1887, Frank on November 25, 1888, Mabel on September 25, 1890, the twins--Grover and Benjamin--on October 27 , 1892, Fred on July 15, 1894, and Thomas Clayton on October 3, 190o. 60 It was in the Woodfin Street rather than the Spruce Street house that Mrs. Wolfe prepared the sumptuous breakfasts and W. 0. prepared the Satanic fir es described with such nostalgic vigor by his youngest child: 1--; Of, ever to wake at morning knowing he was there! To feel the fire full chimney- throat roar up a - tremble with the blast of his terrific fires, to hear the first fire crackling in the kitchen range, to hear the sounds of morning in the house, the smells of breakfast and the feeling of security never to be changed ! Oh, to hear him prowling like a wakened lion below, the stertorous hoarse frenzy of his furious breath; to hear the ominous muttering mounting to faint howls as with infuriating relish he prepared the roaring invective of the morning's tirade, to hear him muttering as the coal went rattling out upon the fire, to hear him growling as savagely the flame shot up the trembling chimneythroat, to hear his giant stride racing through the house prepared now, storming to the charge , and the well-remembered howl of his awakened fury as springing to the door-way of the backroom stairs he flung it open, yelling at them to awake . 61 Only occasionally in later years would he ignite a conflagration in the Old Kentucky Home sufficient to kindle memories of his previous efforts . 62 It was in emulation of her absent father that Effie came near to burning the Woodfin Street house to the ground. In the late 1890s the restless and "far-wandering" W. 0. Wolfe had left Asheville for a three-month jaunt to California. Mrs. Wolfe had gone downtown to her husband ' s place of business, having left Effie charged with the responsibility of keeping a low fire burning in the kitchen range. Following her father's examples , she doused the slackening flame with a can of kerosine, drawn from the drum on the back porch. The ensuing blaze badly damaged the rear of the house on both £loors and , for a while, bade fare to destroy the entire structure. The frugal and enterprising Mrs. Wolfe set carpen-ters to the task of rebuilding almost at once. With the help of her brothers, W. H. and J. M. Westall (both in the building supply and con-struction business) the work was completed according to the original plan in a matter of weeks. W. 0. Wolfe was told nothing of the incident until his return to Asheville. 63 Mrs. Wolfe, in fact, had not had her husband's house repaired, but her own . Ironically , the house referred to as "Papa's house" or in Thomas Wolfe ' s writings as "Gant's house," had been purchased by Mrs. Wolfe from her husband on October 26, 1886 for $2,000. 64 Moreover, it appears that Mrs. Wolfe took some few boarders into the house the summer of 1886, following the death of their first child.65 Happily this precedent was not followed thereafter in the Woodfin Street house; but it can be seen as a harbinger of things to come eighteen years later with Mrs. Wolfe~s boarding 14 • house venture in St. Louis and twenty years later with the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home. The Woodfin Street home was a well-constructed two- story structure of seven rooms. It was said to be the first house in Asheville with a "cement finish, " a finish designed to simulate brownstone. A large front porch, high off the ground, stretched across the front and down both sides of the house. Beneath the house was a dirt- floored cellar used for the storage of fruits and vegetables. The first floor contained four rooms, including the kitchen. As one entered the downstairs hall from the front porch, the parlor was on the right . It contained a suit of upholstered furniture, a what-not filled with shells, curios, and carved marble, a mantel piece adorned by figurines, and a marble top table , above which 15 was suspended a pull-down crystal lamp. The floor of the parlor was covered with a tan Belgian carpet decorated with gold and pink rose clusters. In the ceiling of the parlor and the hallway were medallions fashioned by W. 0. Wolfe. To the rear of the parlor was the living room, which had been originally a bedroom. A side door opened from the living room onto the side porch. Across the hall, opposite the parlor, was the dining room, which contained a long extendable table capable of seating fourteen people. Behind the dining room was the kitchen where the fondly remem-bered Woodfin Street meals were prepared. Upstairs were three bedrooms . Mrs. Wolfe' s stood over the parlor at the front of the house . Mr. Wolfets room was opposite hers, across the small hallway. The childrents room was on the right rear of the house above the living room. A staircase evidently led down from the children~s room to the back porch. The house was heated entirely by four fireplaces, one in each of the three rooms downstairs, excluding the kitchen, and the fourth in Mrs. Wolfets bedroom upstairs . The house contained no plumbing. 66 The front yard on Woodfin Street was small but verdant. Steps led down from the lofty front porch to a marble walkway, which spanned the short distance of about thirty feet from the foot of the steps to the wood and later iron fence. The front yard was fifty feet in width and was heavily planted in a variety of flowers and shrubs . As a general rule the children were not allowed to play in the front yard, but the spacious back yard afforded ample opportunity for play. Although only fifty feet wide, the back yard ran back more than two hundred and fifty feet from the street and featured a variety of fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and a swing for the children. A further attraction of the back yard on Woodfin Street was the one room playhouse which now stands to the left rear of the Old Kentucky Home. The playhouse was built by W. 0. Wolfe with pine lumber about the turn of the century, and was placed behind the right rear or northeast corner 67 of the main house. A plank walkway led from the front of the main house to the doorway of the playhouse. The younger children spent many hours there, especially during inclement weather or on Sunday afternoons when W. 0. Wolfe craved surcease of noise within the main hous·e. The play-house contained chairs, a couch., a stove, an atlas, a large blackboard, and Mrs. Wolfe ' s old Estey organ, which she had obtained before her mar-riage while teaching school in Mitchell County. Tom especially enjoyed the playhouse, seeking there the solitude denied ~ elsewhere. When stay- 16 ing on Woodfin Street the children could jump from the window of the back bedroom onto the roof of the playhouse and from there to the ground below. 68 The Woodfin Street house was situated between the J . M. Israels ' modest house on the west and the grand brick house of the E. W. Hazzards on the east. It was in the driveway of the Hazzards house that the young Thomas 69 Wolfe was near ly run over and killed by a horse and delivery wagon. But more than a driveway separated the Wolfe's from the Razzards; the two fami-lies lived on different planes. The Hazzards were a wealthy South Carolina 17 family from near Charleston. Normally they rented the house to others while living elsewhere. For several years during Wolfe's early youth the house was occupied by the Oliver Cromwell famil y of Philadelphia, which had come to Asheville for Mr. Cromwell ' s failing health. The three Cromwell child-ren were frequent playmates for the younger Wolfe children. James Cromwell would one day marry Doris Duke, and his sister Louise was to become the 70 fir st wife of Douglas MacArthur. The young Thomas Wolfe's c losest friends on Woodfin Street were Charles Perkinson, son of the T. J. Perk.insons across the street and Max Israel, son of the J . M. Israels next door . Though turbulent even in the early years, Wolfe's childhood was at its best on Woodfin Street. Julia Wolfe, however, was never entirely at ease on Woodfin Street . There she was constantly reminded, at times by W. 0 . Wolfe in no uncertain terms, that the house had been built for another woman . Indeed, some of the furniture and bric- a-brac in the house had been brought by Cynthia Hill from Raleigh. W. 0 . Wolfe may have promised to build a house for his new wife on a large lot he had acquired on Merriman Avenue; if so , the promise 71 was never kept. Julia Wolfe had ample cause for discontent~ent under her husband's roof , besides the c onstant reminders of his former marriage. In real life W. 0. Wolfe was a physically imposing, rather impeccable, man of six feet four inches, with a decided proclivity for oratory, hyper-bole, and genial profanity . There was about him a feeling of zestful restlessness, unpredictable expansiveness, and undifferentiated frus tration. Had he chosen another path, he might well have made his mark as an actor or lawyer. Though lacking in formal education, he had acquired an appreciation of cultural and intellectual pursuits. A man of gifted memory, Wolfe indulged his flair for the dramatic with long passages of poetry and scripture. In many ways he was an appealing and colorful man . But his periodic drunkeness and riotous adultery , together with occasional threats of physical violence against his wife and her to·o numerous offspring were, for Mrs. Wolfe, recurring causes of embarrassment, degradation, and anxiety. For his part, the Olympian W. 0 . Wolfe could not abide his wife ' s small mindedness, her unpleasant and frenetic mannerism of speech and gesture, her growing acquisitiveness, her inchoate mysticism, her petty selfishness, and her suffocating niggardliness. Moreover, Mrs. Wolfe was of a fiercely self-reliant nature, and, under the circumstances, fostered a desire to assert her indpendence. At length the unhappy un.ion was to be severed in such a way as to allow Mrs. Wolfe an opportunity both to flee her husband's hearth and give vent to her mounting mania for real estate speculation. The eventual purchase of the Old Kentucky Home and the consequent destruction of a cohesive family life should be seen against the background of both the growing gulf between the ill-mated marriage partners and Asheville ' s mushrooming growth as a tourist and health resort. By 18 the early years of this century Asheville was attracting thousands in search of health and recreation . Asheville was becoming a town on the make, and had begun the transformation which its most famous son would later deplore: New people were coming to town all the time, new faces were being seen upon the streets. There was quite a general feeling in the air that g r eat events were just around the corner, and that a bright destiny was in store for Libya Rill. It was a time when they were just hatching from the shel l , when the place was changing from a little isolated mountain village, lost to the world, with its few thousand native population, to a briskly moving modern town, with railway connections to all parts, and with a growing population of wealthy people who had heard about the beauties of the setting and were coming there to live.72 Hotels and boar ding houses were rapidly proliferating to meet the growing demand for accomodations. As early as 1898 the Ashevill e Board of Trade was promoting tourism and describing the boarding houses of the area in glowing terms : Scores of home - like boarding houses are here; excellent modern f l ats and beautiful private residences, occupied by r efined, cultured people, many of whom are persons of wealth.73 19 By about 1910 the Board of Trade was claiming nineteen hotels for Asheville with rates ranging from $1 . 00 to $6.00 a day, in addition to the "scores of homelike boarding houses [which] offer choice accomodations at from $6 . 00 to 14 . 00 per week."74 It was estimated at this time that " The hotel and boarding house capacity approaches an aggregate of 12,000 to 15,000 ."75 By 1920 , the effective end of Thomas Wolfe's life in Asheville, the Board of Trade was advertising hotel rates from $2.50 to $10 . 00 a day and up , while boarding houses were said to offer room and board ranging from 76 $15.00 to $25.00 a week. Accomodations at the Old Kentucky Home we r e never to fetch such a price. Julia Wolfe's purchase of the Old Kentucky Home was preceded by experience as a boarding house keeper during the summer of 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair. According to one of Mrs. Wolfe's accounts, the initiative for her undertaking the St . Louis venture had come in part from her husband. By this account, Mr. Wolfe had taken the Keeley Cure • for alcoholism about 1901 and for several years had been ab l e to control his drinking. Yet he had grown increasingly restive beneath the burden of his large family and had encouraged his wife to bring in some additional income. This, she later claimed, had been an important factor in her decision. A further inducement for Mrs. Wolfe, according to one account, was the reported success enjoyed by Governor Elias Carr's sister as a boarding house keeper during the Chicago Worldls Fair of 1893. 77 In the spring of 1904 Mrs. Wolfe journeyed to St. Louis with all of the children except Frank and Effie, who remained in Asheville with their father . She had taken a six-month lease on the house of Dr. Paul Paquin of St . Louis, who was to be out of town for a year and whose brother, also a physician, Mrs . Wolfe was acquainted with in Asheville. The house was located at 5095 Fairmont Avenue, on the corner of Fairmont and Academy Street. Until November Mrs. Wolfe operated the residence as the North Carolina House for those visiting the World•s Fair. Many of her tenants · were North Carolinians. Her otherwise profitable St . Louis venture was marred and terminated by the death of Grover there on November 16. Upon notification of the boy's death, W. 0. Wolfe came out to St. Louis and the family returned to Asheville with the body . The death of Grover, like the death of Ben fourteen years later, left a definite mark on the life of the Wolfe family. From time to time in subsequent years, W. 0. Wolfe would denounce his wife's St. Louis enterprise, holding her responsible for the death of the boy whom both regarded as the brightest and most promising of the children. 78 The death of Grover and the subsequent recriminations placed further strains on Julia Wolfe's tolerance for the Woodfin Street house and 20 • 79 helped assure her permanent departure . Soon after the family ' s return from St. Louis, Mrs. Wolfe began looking for a likely boarding house in-vestment. Late in the summer of 1906 one Jack Campbell, a real estate agent, came by the house on Woodfin Street to inform Mrs. Wolfe of the house which the Reverend Myers was placing on the market. After being shown through the house by Mrs. Myers, Julia Wolfe approached her husband on its purchase. The harassed W. 0. Wolfe seems to have acquiesed in a spirit of resignation and perhaps relief: uJack, she wants it, make the papers out to her. 80 If she is satisfied , I dontt care. " According to Mrs. Wolfe's recollections, the papers for transfer of ownership were drawn up and signed the following. day in the offices of the law firm of Bernard and Bernard . At the time of the purchase, the house already contained nineteen boarders paying $8 . 00 a week. 81 The Reverend Myers had 21 already dubbed the house the Old Kentucky Home, in honor of his home state, 82 and requested that the name be retained. Only occasionally, during the temporary proprietorship of short-term lessees, was the name ever changed ther eafter. The deed of August 30, 1906 conveyed ownership of the Old Kentucky Home to Julia E. Wolfe for a purchase price of $6,500 . The property was described as being free of all encumbrances "excepting certain unpaid paving and sewer assessments," for work that had been recently done and f h . h M W lf d .hili 83 f $2 000 or w 1c r s . o e assume respons1 ty. A down payment o , was required. By this time Mrs. Wolfe had accumulated $1,700 for the purchase of a boarding house, including the profit of about $500 from the summer in St. Louis. The balance was to be paid off at a rate of $500 every six months . W. 0. Wolfe was prevailed upon to lend hts wife the balance of the money down required, and, in l ess than a week after 84 the sale, she took actual possession of the house. • 22 Quietly but decisively the family had been cleft in twain. There-after its members were to shuttle for many years between two houses, neither of which was a home. At first and briefly, Mrs. ~olfe exerted some effort to operate her newly acquired business while remaining on Woodfin Street, walking back and forth between the two houses in the early morning before breakfast and late evening after supper. The family adapted to this arrangement after a fashion by taking their lunches and suppers at the Old Kentucky Home. After only about six weeks of commuting between the two houses, Mrs . Wolfe was afflicted with a seriously infected leg and began to sleep in the boarding house. For some weeks she was obliged to conduct her boarding house business from a wheel chair; but she did not return again to Woodfin Street and her husband. Thus, from about October of 1906 the family bonds were permanently severed. Mrs . Wolfe later claimed that, at first, her husband did not seem to mind her living apart and had even seemed to relish his intercourse with the boarders. If this is true, his attitude altered quickly and permanently, as she later owned : But as time went on he declared that I had made a mistake in breaking up the home which I admit was true, scattering the family, trying to live in two houses.85 For more than a decade after the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, the children drifted back and forth between the two houses, depending on whim, domestic circumstances, and the tourist season. A study of the Ashe-ville city directories for the years 1906 to 1918 unfolds a bewildering and frenetic alteration of living arrangements, remarkable for a single family. Family correspondence of the period reveals a similar picture. Addresses changed irregularly with the years and seasons, and it was not unusual for members of the family, writing from out of town, to express uncertainty as to where the various family members were currently to be found. 23 The chief source of information for Thomas Wolfets youth and for life within the Old Kentucky Home must, of course, be Look Homeward 1 Angel. Des - pite Wolfe's disingenuous evasiveness on the point and the recurring dis-claimers of other family members, the novel's depiction of people, places, and events is remarkable for its accuracy and detail. Wolfe was very tender to the accusation that he was merely transcribing actual memories into prose , feeling that such an admission would seriously undermine and diminish his role as a creative and imaginative artist. But one thing after another from the book can be or has been verified. The experiences of Wolfe's protago-nist, Eugene Gant, and of Wolfe himself are, on the whole, virtually iden- 86 tical. Drawing on his prodigiously retentive memory, Wolfe was able to translate the recollections of his youth with amazing vividness and detail: We Wolfes, Papa and Mama and each of us children, I think, have all been possessed of extraordinary powers of remembering. Much of Tom's success as a writer, in my opinion , is attributable to the fact that he never forgot anything •.•• he could sit down and recall in elaborate detail those things he had experienced, what he had seen or heard or tasted or smelled or felt, and put them realistically on paper. Tom's was truly a photographic memory. 87 In a letter to his mother from Harvar d, written three years before he began Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe wrote that he had some memories of childhood before Grover ' s death in 1904, but that after that time he was able to trace his childhood in memory "step by step. " 88 Thirteen years later, in The Story of a Novel, Wolfe alluded to the potentials of his memory as a resoruce for his art: The quality of my memory is characterized, I believe, in a more than ordinary degree by the intensity of its sense impressions, its powers to evoke and bring back the odors, sounds, colors, shapes, and feel of things with concrete vividness.89 MOreover, Wolfe's powe r s of recalling the surroundings of his youth were matched by his ability to recollect the faces, characteristics, and personalities which filled thefuJ • • • the winter boarders in a little boarding house down south twenty years ago; Miss Florrie Mangle, the trained nurse; Miss Jessie Rimmer, the cashier at Reeds drug store; Doctor Richards, the clairvoyant; the pretty girl who cracked the whip and thrust her head into the lion's mouth with Johnny J. Jones Carnival and Combined Shows . 90 Serious students of Wolfe's life and work have found Wolfets auto-biographical fiction approached literal truth most closely in Look Home-war d, Angel . Elizabeth Nowell, long personally and professionally asso-ciated with Wolfe and his most comprehensive biographer , used Look Home - wa r d, Angel as the chief source of information for his early life , because 91 it was " so obviously autobiographical." His second and final editor , Edward Aswell of Harper's, declared the nove l "The most literall y auto-biographical of his books. Nine years after Wolfe ' s death, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner ' s, the man responsible for the publication of Wolfe's first and best novel, recalled his initial recognition of its factual basis : I remember the horror with which I realized, when working with Thomas Wolfe on his manuscript of ''The Angel, t• that all of these people were almost completely r eal, that the book was liter all y autobiographical.93 One Wolfe schol ar familiar with the events and sur roundings of his child-hood has concluded that: There are many more than 300 characters and places mentioned by name or described in Look Homeward , Angel, and prob ab ly there is not an entirely fict itious person, place , or incident in t he whole novel. • • • Those migrant boarders a nd tourists who came to the Old Kentucky Home, rocked on the front porch for a spell , and moved on are seldom identifiable. Wolfe remembered them, but townspeople do not; and the minor exploits of boarders are rarel y recorded by the papers.94 It was because of the penetrating and scathing accuracy of Wolfe ' s portrait of Asheville that Look Homeward, Angel evoked such widespread furor. Two decades of the town's history had been vivisected and 24 placed on display before the world; the town would not soon forgive the apostate son who climbed the pinnacle of literary fame by flaying the 95 place of his birth. Wolfe ' s sister, Mabel, a resident of Ashevil le at the time of the book's publication, recalled the vehemence of the city's reaction : The only thing, I felt, that saved us Wolfes from being tarred and feathered was the fact that Tom had not spared us . He had lambasted the neighbors, but he had pictured his own family also, the community agreed, in no flattering light.96 A shudder ran through the mortified city as residents recognized them· selves and acquaintances vividly portrayed in the pages of the book. With only slight exaggeration, Thomas Wolfe described Asheville ' s feel-ings t-e\.rard him in his account of "Libyan Hill ts" reaction to the pub - lication of George Webber ' s first novel, "Home to Our Mountains": 'I have spent most of my time this past week, ' George wrote, 'reading and rereading all the letters that my erstwhile friends and neighbors have written me since the book came out. And now that the balloting is almost over and most of the vote is in, the result is startling and a little confusing. I have been variously compa r ed to Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Caesar's Brutus. I have been likened to the bird that fouls its own nest , to a viper that an inocent populace had long nurtured to its bosom, to a carrion crow preying upon the blood and bones of his relatives and friends, and to an unnatural ghoul to whom nothing is sacred, not even the tombs of the honored dead. I have been called a vulture, a skunk, a hog deliberately and lustfully wallowing in the mire, a defiler of pure womanhood , a rattlesnake, a jackass , an alleycat, and a baboon ••• there have been moments when I felt that maybe my accusers are right. • 97 In spite of his protestations of artistic integrity and wounded innocence, Wolfe had in fact anticipated a harsh reaction by Asheville . His notebooks clearly reveal that he had even drafted various defenses 98 against the expected onslaught before publication of the novel. Almost certainly, however, he was astonished and dismayed by the pitch and ex-tent of the uproar and by the agonizing slowness with which the hometown J;esentment against him waned: 25 I had thought that there might be a hundred people in that town who would read the book, but if there were a hundred outside of the negr o population, the blind , and the positively illiterate who did not read it, I do not know where they are. For months the town seethed with a fury of resentment which I had not believed possible.99 In the early and mid 1920s, during his first years away from Asheville, Wolfe had been wont to see himself as the sensitive and unappreciated artist in exile; he now found himself repudiated, disavowed, and held in contempt by the city upon which he had previously cast his scorn. He had hoped to prove himself to Asheville as a poet and genius, and the city ' s rejection of him was profound diappointment. 100 At length a more mature Wolfe came to regret having given so little quarter and not having considered the potential consequences of his book more carefully: I had written the book, more or less, directly from the experience of my own life, and, furthermore, I now think that I may have written it with a certain naked intensity of spirit which is likely to characterize the earliest work of a young writer.lOl . . • the young writer is often led through inexperience to a use of the materials of life which are, perhaps, somewhat too naked and direct for the purpose of a work of art. The thing a young writer is likely to do is to confuse the limits between actuality and reality. He tends unconsciously to describe an event in such a way because it actually happened that way, and from an artistic point of view, I can now see that this is wrong. It is not, for example, important that one remembers a beautiful woman of easy virtue as having come from the state of Kentucky in the year 1907. She could perfectly well have come from Idaho or Texas or Nova Scotia. The important thing really is only to express as well as possible the character and quality of the beautiful woman of easy virtue.l02 And so it is with some caution and much confidence one can turn to Look Homeward, Angel for a more or less accurate representation of the crucial role played by the Old Kentucky Home in Wolfe's youth and in the life of the family as a whole: 26 In the young autumn when th.e maples were still full and green •• • Eliza moved into Dixieland. There was a clangor, excitement, vast curiosity in the family about the purchase, but no clear conception of what had really happened. Gant and Eliza, although each felt dumbly that they had come to a decisive boundary in their lives, talked vaguely about their plans, spoke of Dixieland evasively as 'a good investment, ' said nothing clearly. In fact they felt their approaching separation instinctively: Eliza's life was moving by a half-blind but inevitable gravitation toward the centre of its desire - the exact meaning of her venture she would have been unable to define, but she had a deep conviction that the groping urge which had led her so blindly into death and misery at Saint Louis had now impelled her in the right direction. Her life was on its rails. And however vaguely, confusedly, and casually they approached this complete disruption of their life together , the rooting up of their clamerous home, when the hour of departures came, the103 elements resolved themselves immutably and without hesitation. Family life on Woodfin Street had been tur bulent and at times trau-matic, especially when W. 0. Wolfe embarked on his periodic and protracted drinking bouts and gave vent to his manifold frustrations. But, on the whole, life had been reasonably cohesive and pleasant, even though a permanent tension had already settled between W. 0. and Julia Wolfe. By the time of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, Frank ("Steve") had already taken up his drink-sodden and vagabond existence; he descended on Asheville now only at irregular intervals, drifting in and out of family life in the two houses. 104 Effie's ("Daisy's") marri-age was not quite, as Wolfe writes, "growing near" at the time of purchase. 105 She was not to marry Fred Gambrell until September 16, 1908. 106 During the interim she remained with Mabel and their father on Woodfin Street. 107 Leslie , the first child, h.ad by this time been dead for twenty years. Grover had died in St . Louis two years before the purchase . Tom was dragged umbilically to Spruce Street by his mother: 27 Eliza took Eugene with her. He was the last tie that bound her to all the weary life of breast and cradle; he still slept with her of nights; she was like some swimmer who ventures out into a dark and desperate sea, not wholly trusting to her strength and destiny, but with a slender cord bound to her which stretches still to land .l08 Ben and Fred ("Luke") were, as in Look Homeward, Angel, "left floating 109 in limbo," drifting uncertainly between the two houses. W. 0. Wolfe's celebrated views of the Old Kentucky Home and of boarding house life are only slightly exaggerated and caricatured in the novel as those of ''W. 0. Gant": Gant had already named it ' The Bam t; in the morning now, after his heavy breakfast at home, he would swing gauntl y toward town by way of Spring Street, composing en route the invective that he had formerly reserved to his sitting-room. He would stride through the wide ch.ill hall of Dix.ieland, busting in upon Eliza, and two or three of the negresses, busy preparing the morning 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 vented now. ''Woman, you have deserted my bed and board , you have made a laughing stock out of me before the world, and left your cflildren to perish. Fiend that you are, there is nothing that you would not do to torture, humiliate and degrade me. You have deserted me in my old age; you have left me to die alone. Ah, Lord! It was a bitter day for us all when your gloating eyes first fell upon this damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody Barn. There is no ignominy to which you will not stoop if you think it will put a nickel in your pocket. You have fallen so low not even your own brothers will come near you. 'Nor beast, nor man hath fallen so far.' "llO With less bombast, in a letter to Tom in 1917, the actual W. 0 . Wolfe ex-pressed his feelings toward the boarding house with simple and terse eloquence: " There are few at O.K.H. It would be much better if none were th ,111 ere. From time to time the exercised w. 0. Wolfe must have inveighed against the IllOtley array of character s which inevitably found their way to all but the most exclusive of Asheville boarding houses: "'Merciful God!' howled Gant, 'you've had 'em all-blind, lame, crazy, chippies and bastards. 112 They all come here.'" 28 Doubtless W. 0. Wolfe, like Gant, enjoyed the celebrity among the boarders which his commanding presence, dogmatic pronouncements, and colorful and hyperbolic personality won for him: Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would hold forth on the porch, his great voice carrying across the quiet neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his torrential eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his prejudiced but bold opinion upon current news.ll3 Less pleasant, indeed horrendous and humiliating, moments in the spot-light must have been passed by W. 0. Wolfe when, in the throes of his recurrent alcoholic seizures, he would cut a wide and abusive swath through the boarders and seriously disrupt Mrs. Wolfe's endeavors to 114 carry on a remunerative business. Ample evidence of other family members' disrelish of the boarding house might easily be gleaned from Look Homeward, Angel. Virtually every member of the family expresses himself on the subject at some point in the novel, and I am not aware that any member of the family has had his 29 view substantially misrepresented . In a letter to Elizabeth Nowell concern-ing Tom's infatuation with Clara Paul ("Laura James"), Mabel Wolfe Wheaton wrote: " •.. she fitted into the boarding house business which I had learned to hate."115 Later Mabel stated that: • I was always more interested in 92 Woodfin than I was in 116 the Spruce Street house, even throughout the time Mama owned it. Fred Wolfe recalled that, while the other Wolfe children were not so sensi- 117 tive on the issue as Tom, ''none of us liked to see Mama keep boarders.tt In comparing the Old Kentucky Home with the previous residence, Fred Wolfe remarked: Why this is a house. That was a home. That was the scene of our activity as children, the big Christmases, the big Fourth of July celebrations. That's where all the food was. That's where Mama reared us. That's where all the fruit and flowers were. Why, that was home ..•• 118 Of all the Wolfe children, Tom seems to have been most traumatically affected by the fractured family life and by the bleak, tumultuous , tawdry, and crowded life at the Old Kentucky Home: Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland . •• he felt thwarted, netted, trapped . He hated the indecency of his life, the loss of dignity and seclusion, the surrender to the tumultuous rabble of the four walls which shield us from them. He felt rather than understood, the waste, the confusion, the blind cruelty of their lives - his spirit was stretched out on the rack of despair and bafflement as there came to him more and more the conviction that their lives could not be more hopelessly distorted, wrenched, mutilated, and perverted away from all simple comfort, repose, happiness, if they had set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein, twist the pattern.ll9 There was no place sacred unto themselves, no place fixed for their own inhabitation, no proof against the invasion of the boarders.l20 30 In contrast to the Old Kentucky Home, Thomas Wolfe would always remem - 121 ber the Woodfin Street house as expansive, warm, and hospitable. Wolfe ' s principal biographers are agreed that the relative security and happiness of his early youth were swept away with the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home and the consequent disintegration of family life. 122 Like Eugene Gant, the young Thomas Wolfe returned to his fatherts house whenever possible: the powerful charm of Gant's house, of its tacked and added whimsey, its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its great gummed trees, its roaring internal seclusiveness, the blistered varnish, the hot calf- skin, the comfort and abundance, seduced him easily away from the great chill tomb of Dixieland • . As a rule, it was during peak periods of the summer, when bed space was at a premium, that Mrs. Wolfe would allow him to stay in his father's house. The neurotic tenacity with which Mrs . Wolfe clung to her youngest child was to permanently handicap him : "This abnormally prolonged infantile relationship affected Wolfe's entire character and life."124 The 123 members of the family on Woodfin Street were very much aware of his feelings: "[Tom] always wanted to live back home - we always left the doors un- 1 k d 11125 oc e . The separation of the family and the protracted and piti-able deterioration of W. 0. Wolfe's health, which began less than a decade afterward, all but destroyed the fabric of family life. For Thomas Wolfe the results were to prove a life- long emotional instability and im-maturity, a deep feeling of insecurity, a fear of enduring emotional 126 conmdtments, and a brooding introspectiveness. In the "Autobiographi-cal Outline" now at Harvard which Wolfe used as a guide in the writing of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe noted: "After Woodfin Street total lack of ritual in our life . •• 127 • the almost Over the years the initial feelings of vague alienation of the Old Kentucky Home took on a more definite shape. Like his father, Wolfe was temperamentally and instinctively averse to certain pervasive features of boarding house life. He detested the crass and demeaning commercialism of "drumming up trade " with prospective boarders. He recoiled from the enterpri se upon which his mother had embarked: In him as in Gant , there was a silent horror of sel ling for money the bread of one's table, the shelter of one ' s walls, to the guest, the stranger , the unknown friend from out of the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the broken , the knave, the harlot, and the fool.l28 Wolfe's lack of heart for drumming up trade for his mother ' s boarding house was to be an enduring feature of his personality and character. Mabel Wolfe Wheaton recalled that on several occasions Wolfe went to considerable trouble to prevent his classmates at the University of North Carolina from discovering that his mother kept a boar ding house. The embarrassing event described in Look Homeward , Angel as having occurred during the spring of his freshman year, seems to have had a f:trm basis in 129 fact. Mrs. Wolfe did in fact humiliate him during a visit to Chapel 31 • Hill. The mortified and perplexed Wolfe reported the incident to his sister at her home in Raleigh: M-M-M- Mabel, Mable, my God, she's ruining me over at Chapel Hill ••• I'll swear she's just r - r-ruining me with my friends. • • • My God Mabel, do y-y-y-you know what Mama d-d-did? Some of the fellows came to see her and when they told her, just being p-p-p-polite, that they would 1-1-like to come to Asheville this summer, she said, 'Well, if you boys will d-d-drum me up some business for the b- b-boarding house, I' 11 give you your b- b-board for nothing.' I tell yoy3~-M-M-Mabel, Mama's just ruining me over at Chapel Hill. As a boy Wolfe found his privacy constantly intruded upon and his spirit borne down by the petty annoyances of life in the Old Kentucky Home. For many years he harbored a deep resentment of the numberless, futile, demeaning, and random duties he was called upon to perform: Eliza grumbled at the boy's laziness . She complained that she could get him to do little or nothing for her. In fact, he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of the boarding house routine. Her demands on him were not heavy, but they were frequent and unexpected. He was depressed at the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure of daily labor.l31 This lingering resentment surfaced at other times in his work, as in the "Three O'Clock" musings of young George Webber in The Web and the Rock: And if there is work to do at three o'clock ••• for God's sake give us something real to do •••• For God's sake don't destroy the heart and hope and life and will , the brave and dreaming soul of man, with common, dull, soul-sickening, mean transactions of these little things.l32 Another aspect of the boarding house operation in which Wolfe un-avoidably found himself involved was his mother's perennial problems with her hired help: Eliza got along badly with the negroes •.•• she had never been used to service, and she did not know how to accept or govern it graciously . She nagged and berated the sullen negro girls constantly, tortured by the thought that they were stealing her furnishings, and dawdling away the time for which she paid them. 133 32 Time and again Mrs. Wolfe would find herself deserted at a crucial point in the boarding house routine and would be forced to implore Mabel's assistance or send young Tom loathingly forth into the filth and degra-dation of "Niggertown" in search of a wretch willing or desperate enough to enter her dreaded employment. 134 Craving solitude, the young Thomas Wolfe would escape where he might within the crowded vastness of the Old Kentucky Rome, at his father's house on Woodfin Street, or in the playhouse. He employed what time and privacy he could snatch from the bustle of family life to accomplish the omnivorous reading which was to stand him in good stead for his life's work. Family members joked of discovering him in secluded and unexpected places "coiled up" and reading. Before moving on to the holdings of the public library, Wolfe eagerly devoured his fatherts libarary on Woodfin Street--a library remarkably rich and varied for a tradesman's library of that day or this . The pleasure and escape which the young Wolfe found in books was not sufficient, however, to counterbalance the hectic drearinessand shallow turbulence of everyday family existence. Years later, while engaged in the writing of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe spoke bitterly of the trauma and sorrow of his childhood in a letter to Mrs. J. M. Roberts, the woman whose teaching and guidance had rescued him from the ''bleak horror of Dixieland":135 You say that no one outside my family loves me more than Margaret Roberts. Let me rather say the exact truth: - that no one inside my family loves me as much, and only one other person, I think, in all the world loves me as much. My book if full of ugliness and terrible pain - and I think moments of a great and soaring beauty. • I was without a home - a vaga-bond since I was seven - with two roofs and no home . I moved inward on that house of death and tumult from room to little room, as the boarders came with their dollar a day, and their constant rocking on the porch. My overloaded heart was bursting with its packed weight of loneliness and terror; I was strangling, without speech, without articulation, in my own 33 secretions - groping like a blind sea-thing with no eyes and a thousand feelers toward light, toward life, toward beauty and order, out of that hell of chaos, greed and cheap ugliness - and then I found you, when else I should have died, you mother of my spirit who fed me with light. Do you think that I have forgotten? Do you think that I ever will?l36 The year preceding the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe felt it necessary to assure his mother that he had not irreconcilably turned his back on his family: I want to tell you something very plainly: I am not trying to avoid seeing any of you . • • . There has been no evasion. And, in spite of an ugly and rancorous feeling towards me which may exist in the family - a dislike which most of us feel for anything that is strange to us, remote from our experience, and living on a separate level of thought and feeling - I want to see you all very much - no matter howmuch pain and ugliness I may have to remember.l37 It would be a mistake to represent Wolfe's childhood, after the pur-chase of the Old Kentucky Home, as a protracted period of utter bleakness and unhappiness. There were occasional good times still for the boy and his family. At times the volatile children and parents blended harmoni.- ously together. There were scattered peri.ods of espri.t and genuine en-joyment of each other's company . Sometimes the mi.x of personalities in the Old Kentucky Home would result in an agreeable rapport between the Wolfes and their boarders. Wolfe forever retained fond memories of the family and boarders gathered around the piano in the parlor, as Mabel played and sang perennial favorites: On small solicitation, she sang for the boarders, thumping the cheap piano with her heavy accurate touch, and singing in her strong vibrant, somewhat hard soprano a repertoryof songs classical, sentimental, and comic. Eugene remembered the soft cool nights of summer, the assembled boarders , and ~I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, ,. which Gant demanded over and over; 'Love Me and the World is Minet: ~Till the ~ands of the Desert Grow Cold'; 'Dear Old Girl, the Rob-bin Sings Aoove You'; ~The End of a Perfect Day, t and t Alexander ~s Rag-Time Band,,. wlrlch Luke had practised in a tortured house for weeks~ and sung with thunderous success in the high schoo1Minstrels.l~8 34 He listened with awed attentiveness as his father indulged his flair for oratory and declamation or recited long passages of Gray, Tennyson, Scott, Shakespeare, and others from memory. For several years after the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, he accompanied his mother on long extended trips to Washington, Memphis, Hot Springs, Florida, and elsewhere.139 These trips whetted an appetite for travel which, in his adult life, was seldom sated, and afforded a welcome relief from the hectic unpleasantness of boarding house life. Notwithstanding the excess of sadness over joy in the future novel-ist's life at the Old Kentucky Rome, the boarding house played a crucial role in forcing his interaction with a colorful and unending parade of personalities and characters of every possible description. Each of the varying personages with which he came in contact might one day prove useful to the writer; some were also meaningful and important to a sensi-ti ve and insecure young man. According to Look Homeward , Angel, Wolfe struck up a close friendship at the Old Kentucky Home during the summer of 1914 with a spinster school teacher from New York. 140 The consolation and understanding of a regular boarder from Florida, represented by Wolfe as "Miss Irene Mallard," helped guide him through a difficult period of his youth and afforded him a companionship which he sorely needed on at least two occasions. 141 Doubtless there were many others over the years with whom Wolfe formed lasting and heart-felt associations. The Old Kentucky Rome brought him the poignant summer interlude with Clara Paul from Washington, North Carolina, represented as "Laura James" from "Little Richmond" in Look Homeward, Angel. Clara Paul was twenty-one years old. She had come to Asheville with her ten year old brother because of his ill health. Moreover, she was already promised to another, and, 35 after a brief stay at the Old Kentucky Home , she returned to Washington and was married. Two years later she was to die of influenza. Wolfe considerably fictionalized his account of the bitter-sweet romance in Look Homeward, Angel; in truth it seems to have been an unconsumated infatua- 142 tion between a teenage boy and a young woman whom he knew to be engaged. Less innocent, but not less instructive, were the brief encounters at the Old Kentucky Home with women of easier virtue. Several episodes of both active and passive seduction were recorded in Look Homeward , Angel~ such as the interludes with the incognito and mysterious prostitute '~ss Brown" and the middle-aged dentist's wife from South Carolina, with whom he carried on illicitly during the summer of 1920, until her consequent 143 ejection from the house by Mrs. Wolfe. The passing parade of boarders through the years provided the future novelist with an almost endless array of colorful and varied charcters, faces, and memories from which to draw: The Ohio woman who died of typhoid and whose distraught husband ''came quickly out into the hall and dropped 36 his hands"; the "thin-faced Jew" on the upstairs sleeping porch who "coughed through the interminable dark"; the lunatic "mul-tye-millionaire, Mr. Simon"; "Miss Billie Edwards . • • , the daring and masterful lion-tamer of Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows"; ''Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of an itinerant and usually absent drug salesman," who had an affair with Ben; ''Mr. Conway Richards, candy wheel concQssionaire with the Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows"; "Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six, trained nurse"; "Mr . William H. Baskett, fifty-three, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi,'' cotton grower, banker, and sufferer from malaria; '~ss Annie Mitchell, nineteen, of Valdosta, Georgia"; '~ss Thelma Cheshire, twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina"; ''Mrs . Rose Levin , twenty- eight, of Chicago, Illinois"; 11Miss Malone, the gaunt drug- eater with the loose gray lips"; " Fowler, a civil engineer • • • who came and departed quickly leaving a sodden stench of cornwhiskey in his wake"; ' 'Mary Thomas, a tall, jolly, young prostitute who came from Kentucky," who was a friend of "Helen's"; and the tall, mysterious , seductive, and adulterous Mrs. Selborne from South Carolina, who had a b rief affair with "Steve" her fir st sununer in the Old Kentucky Home and whose Negro cook ''W. 0. Gant" attempted unsuccessfully and disastrously to seduce in the playhouse on Woodfin Street. 144 Wolfe would remember the winters in the Old Kentucky Home as periods 37 of frigid bleakness: In the winter a few chil l boarders, those faces, those personalities which became mediocre through repetition , sat f or hours before the coals of the parl or hearth , rocking inter minably, dull of voice and gesture, as hideously bored with themselves and Dixieland, no doubt, as he [Eugene] with them. l45 The sununers, though crowded, hectic, and bereft of privacy, teemed with impressions at once sensual and sensuous, which were stored up in the capacious cache of Wolfe ' s memory: There came slow- bodied women from the hot rich South, darkhaired white bodied girls from New Orleans, com- haired blondes from Georgia, nigger- drawling desire from South Carolina. And there was malarial l assitude tinged faintly with yellow , from Mississippi but with white biting teeth. A red-faced South Carolinean, with n .icotined fingers, took him daily to baseball games; a lank yellow planter, malarial from Mississippi, climbed hills and wandered through the fragrant mountain valleys with him, of nights he heard the rich laughter of the women, tender and cruel, upon the d ark por ches , heard the florid throat tones of the men; saw the yielding stealthy harlotry of the Sout h - the dark secl usion of their midnight bodies, their morning innocence . l46 In spite of its tumult, its sordidness, its lack of privacy, its petty annoyance, and its emotional deprivation , boarding house life could not but contribute vivid color and emotive intensity to the work of an autobio-graphical novelist : • • • • the artist in him was bound to profit from the assortment of types that came to the Old Kentucky Home, just as his being born into a large, tempestuous family was a great human and psychological advantage, much as he suffered from their outbursts. l47 The Old Kentucky Home, of course, figures most prominently in Look Homeward, Angel as 11Dixieland. " It is the very hub around which the Gant saga revolves: The Old Kentucky home is so much like Dixieland that one who enters the house for the first time feels as if he were rereading the book. Wolfe has described minutely and accurately the rooms and furniture of the old boardinghouse.l48 The house plays an important part again in Of Time and the River, parti-cularly as the scene of his father's continued decline and death. In the two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, Wolfe, always sensitive to the accusation of being too autobio-graphical, attempted to reduce and alter the almost literal transcription 38 of his memories into prose. Rather clumsily and transparently, he changed the name of his protagonist from Eugene Gant to George Webber, and made other changes in a misguided attempt to diverge from authobiography. These attempts, however, were neither thorough-going, consistent, nor successful. In spite of increasing endeavors to create r~ther than record, in spite of changes in names and background, George Webber was almost as surely Thomas Wolfe as Eugene Gant had been, and "Libya Hill" nearly as faithful a rendering of Asheville as "Altamont" had been. Ostensibly the old boarding house disappeared from his later work. In The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again the house of George Webber's youth is depicted as a small one-story house on Locust S~reet, built by his Aunt Maw's father, Lafayette Yoy.ner. But, not unlike the Old Kentucky Home, • 39 the house is described as being of frame construction with a porch, gables, and bay windows . 149 In The Web and the Rock Wolfe overlapped Look Homeward, Angel chronol ogically by creating a new youth for his protagonist. George Webber is raised by his Aunt Maw, who has inherited responsibility for him following the desertion of his father , John Webber, and the death of his mother, Amelia- -Aunt Maw's younger sister. On first blush, Wolfe's charac-ters, situations, and settings seem to have been transformed; but he was, in fact, still mining the quarry of memories as Edward Aswell, the editor of his posthumous novels noted: Having abandoned Eugene Gant, he went back and re-created a new childhood for George Webber, working in the things he had forgotten when he wrote Look Homeward, Angel as well as a few of the things that had been cut from that book.l50 Floyd Watkins observed that, in The Web and the Rock, Wolfe added at least sixty-four characters from both memory and imagination which he had not used before". ' Wolfe inevitably returned to the fountainhead of memory and experience which had served him so well in Look Homewarq Angel. The Old Kentucky Home was of course the locale of various events which formed milestones in the life of the Wolfe family. On September 16, 1908 Effie was married, in a very grand style, to Fred Gambrell of Anderson, South Carolina, in the large dining room downstairs.152 rt was at the Old Kentucky Home that Frank met and seduced his future wife, the asthmatic Margaret Dietz, who had come to Asheville for her health from New Albany, Indiana. 153 On the evening of June 28, 1916 Mabel Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton were joined in conjugal union in a plush ceremony in the dining room, des-cribed in the newspaper account as "the west parlor of the commodious res1".d e nce. 11154 On the evening of October 19, 1918 occurred in the house the death of Ben, of all Wolfe's siblings the one to whom he felt closest. It was not only in Look Homeward, Angel that the death of his favorite brother proved a shattering and pivotal event in his life. Nearly a decade later, in a letter to his mother, Wolfe reflected the significance of his loss: Life dropped one of its big shells on us and blew us apart. Life at home practically ceased to be possible for me. when Ben died.lSS Ben had grown ill in the pitiably small and austere room upstairs with the small sleeping porch. Subsequently he was moved for warmth and comfort into the larger adjoining room on the northeast corner of the house: • the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian baywindow. It was next to the sleeping-porch where, but three weeks before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage curse at life. 156 The death scene which Thomas Wolfe would later describe--one of the great scenes in all of literature--would be drawn from the sorrow and bitterness 157 of a very personal loss. Like W. 0., Julia, and Tom, who would follow him at length, Ben "lay in the parlor bedded in his expensive coffin," 158 against the wall on the right as one enters from the hall. Four years later, on June 20, 1922, after many years of wretched and hopeless combat with a rampant cancer, W. 0. Wolfe was to die in the down- 40 stairs back bedroom of the house which had so often been the object of his eloquent invective. 159 The man who had once bestrode his small we~ld like a reeling colossus, had in his declining years become an emaciated and self-pitying old man. For more than a decade after the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, W. 0. Wolfe had resolutely continued to make his home on Woodfin Street, despite the gnawing progress that cancer was maktng within him during his last years there. In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe indicated that his father's final move into the Old Kentucky Home. came 160 during the summer of 1917. This is corroborated by a letter of July 9, 161 1917 from W. 0. Wolfe to his son Ben. Mabel and Ralph Wheaton contin-ued to live in the Woodfin Street house, and were accepting roomers there in 1917 and 1918 . 162 As W. 0. Wolfe drew out his death on Spruce Street, his home on Woodfin Street and his shop on Pack Square were sold in quick succession. On April 24, 1920 the house was sold to one J . R. Durrett of 163 Marion County, Kentucky for $6,500 . Little more than a week later, on 41 164 May 3, 1920, the monument shop was sold to a Philip R. Moale for $25,000. The two structures around which W. 0 . Wolfe's life had revolved for nearly four decades were no longer so much as a part of it. 165 On May 22, 1920 Fred wrote a letter to Tom at Chapel Hi.ll, in which was reflected a mutual resentment and melancholy toward what had happened: I suppose that you are acquainted with the sale of the Woodfin property and the Wolfe Building. As to what our personal opinions are - regarding either - now is no time to cry over spilt milk. I had nothing to do with either deal, nor was my advice asked. I would suggest that nothing be said to worry Papa, he was not the power behind the throne in the sales . My main hope is - that he will be made comfortable for the remainder of his days (long or short?) on Spruce St. l66 During the late winter of 1919-1920 the furniture in the Woodfin Street 167 house was moved into the Old Kentucky Home . The house into which W. 0. Wolfe finally and reluctantly moved in 1917 was essentially as it is today. When Mrs. Wolfe bought the house in August of 1906 it was probably very much as it had been since the massive additions of 1885-1889. Thomas Wolfe best describes the overall appearance of the house at the time of his mother's purchase: It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middleclass street of small houses 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 deepbodied maples: there was a sloping depth of one hundred and ninety feet , a frontage of one hundred and twenty.l68 For ten years after Mrs. Wolfe•s purchase the house remained virtually unchanged, but in 1916 she undertook a substantial enlargement in order 169 to accomodate a larger share of the tourist trade: Meanwhile, business had been fairly good . Eliza's earning power for the first few years at Dixieland had been injured by her illnesses . Now, however, she had recovered, and had paid off the last installment on the house. It was entirely hers. The property at this time was worth perhaps $12,000. In addition she had borrowed $3,500 on a twenty year $5,000 life insurance policy that had only two years more to run, and had made extensive alterations: she had added a large sleeping porch upstairs, tacked on two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side, and two baths, and a watercloset, on the other . Downstairs she had widened the veranda, put in a large sun- parlor under the sleeping porch, knocked out the archway in the dining room, which she prepared to use as a big bedroom in the slack season, scooped out a small pantry in which the family was to eat, and added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her own occupancy. The construction was a.fter her own plans, and of the cheapest material: it never lost the smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and flimsy rough plastering, but she had added eight or ten rooms at a cost of only $3 , 000.170 The venerable hot - air furnace wlrlch had groaned and faltered under the burden of heating the house before the additions, had no prayer of doing so now . The rooms which had been added onto the back of the house upstairs and the sleeping porch at the head of the stairs were heated by small wood and coal stoves which opened into flues . In the early 1920s the old furnace gave up the ghost entirely, and stoves and heaters were installed in other rooms of the house. 171 Since 1916 the appearance of the house has changed little if at all, except for an occasional change in color . Wolfe's description of the house as painted a "dirty yellow'' was probably accurate for the entire period depicted in Look Homeward, .Angel. .An undated hand-colored postcard shows the house (being operated as the Colonial) as it appeared prior to 1916. 42 in April of 1921 W. 0. Wolfe wrote his son at Harvard of a recent change in the appearance of the house: '~ou could not recognize the O.K.H. which is newley [sic] painted cream body and chocklate [sic] trim."172 The house has been white since at least the early 1950s and may have been so since the late 1930s or early 1940s. 43 I have been unable to discover exactly how the house was furnished at the time of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase. It seems probable that some of the Reverend Myer's furnishings remained in the house when ownership changed. The older of the two pianos and the formidable wood range in the kitchen are known to have been in the house prior to 1906. 173 Because Mrs. Wolfe inherited nineteen boarders with the purchase of the house, it is likely that much or all of the furniture in their rooms would have been left undisturbed . Doubtless some furniture was brought up from Woodfin Street in 1906 and from time to time thereafter. More would have come with W. 0. Wolfe during his move in 1917. But until near the sale of the Woodfin Street house, there was a need to leave adequate furnishings in the original house to maintain a separate household. Finally, at the time of the sale of the Woodfin Street house, the balance of its furnishings were moved into the Old 174 Kentucky Home. For as long as Mrs. Wolfe operated the Old Kentucky Home as a board~g house, the hub of activity was in the dining room. During the period of Wolfe's youth depicted in Look Homeward, Angel there were four large tables in the dining room, each with a capacity for eight to ten people. Near the door stood the family table where boarders "of long standing" were some-times invited to sit. After the additions in 1916 the family members seemed to have been shunted off into the small pantry near the dining room. Meals were served in four separate sets of dishes, so that each 44 of the tables was sufficient unto itsel£ . 175 During the salad days of the boarding house operation, Mrs. Wolfe received a weekly remuneration from her guests of seven or eight dollars. In addition to cooking for her regular boarders, Mrs. Wolfe also served meals to outside guests or drop- ins, who purchased their meals at prices ranging from 25¢ for breakfast to SO¢ for 176 Sunday dinner. In the early period much of the produce needed for the Old Kentucky Home kitchen was supplied by the vegetable garden and fruit trees at Woodfin Street. Mrs. Wolfe continued to raise smaller quantities of vegetables and white grapes at the Old Kentucky Home until her last days . 177 Mabel Wolfe Wheaton's recollection was that 'we had soup 365 days of the year" and that her mother charged eight to ten dollars a week for room and board. 178 By the very early 1920s or before, when Mrs. Wolfe gave up the boarding house business and began to keep roomers only, the dining room was converted into a large bedroom. Look Homeward, Angel dates 179 the closing of the dining room as early as the death of Ben in 1918. In the declining years of the Old Kentucky Home, the dining room fell into desuetude and served only as storage space. 180 The Old Kentucky Home was operated under several proprietors during the period of Wolfe ' s youth. Mrs . Wolfe very often took extended trips during the slack winter months and occasionally at other times of the year. During these periods of her absence the Old Kentucky Home was leased out to others and was occasional ly operated under another name. According to Mabel Wolfe Wheaton the house was being operated as the Colonial in 1910 by Mrs. 0 . L. Neville . 181 If this is true, the colored post card earlier referred to can be dated accordingly. But the situation of 1910 is ren-dered problematical by the City Directory of that year, which at once, 45 places Olive Neville and the Colonial at 29 Flint Street, states that the Old Kentucky Home is being operated as a boarding house at 48 Spruce Street, that the house at 48 Spruce Street is vacant, and that Mrs. Julia Wolfe is idin 92 T.T dfin S i h the rest of the f.,.,...;ly ·. 182 res g at noo treet w t ~ In 1916 the house was operated by M. M. and Catherine D. Castillo as the Richmond. 183 Probably there we re other proprietors and other names under which the house was operated during Mrs. Wolfe's absence. Upon her return, however, Mrs. Wolfe seems to have repossessed her boarding house with a vengeance from her hapless tenants : In the winter now, she rented Dixieland for a few months, sometimes for a year, although she really had no intention of allowing the place to slip through her fingers during the profitable summer season: usually she let the place go, more or less deliberately, to some unscrupulous adventuress of lodging houses, good for a month's or two months• rent, but incapable of the sustained effort that would support it for a longer time. On her return from her journey, with rents in arrears, or with some other violation of the contract as an entering wedge, Eliza would surge triumphantly into battle, making a forced entrance with police, plain-clothes men, warrants, summonses, writs, injunctions, and all the artillery of legal warfare, possessing herself forcibly and with vindictive pleasure, of her property.l84 Mrs . Wolfe followed a gruelling and hectic regimen in operating the Old Kentucky Home, especially before closing the dining room. Wolfe would later describe her compulsive toil as beginning before seven in the morning and extending often until two o'clock the following morning. 185 In the early years Mrs. Wolfe passed her fleeting hours of sleep in the front bedroom downstairs with the bay window. Later, following the additions of 1916, she moved into the small bedroom at the rear of the house just off the k •t h 186 ~ c en. Before 1920 and Wolfe's departure for Harvard, Mrs. Wolfe had delegated much of the everyday operations of the house to a '~ss Newton, a wrenny and neurotic old maid with asthma ••• [who] had gradually become Eliza's unofficial assistant in the management of the house,'' while she devoted more and more of her time and energies to her proliferating real estate speculations. 187 During the years of Wolfe's youth, North Spruce Street was a neighbor-hood of private residences and several boarding houses. The Dixie, the Colonial, the Elton, the Belvidere, and the ~elmont, their various pro-prietors, and some of their boarders would have been among his recollec-tions of the Spruce Street neighborhood (see Appendix G). An examination of the city directories indicates that North Spruce Street was emerging as a boarding house street as early as the 1890s. By the time of which Wolfe wrote in Look Homeward, Angel, this development had made considerable head-way. Across the street from the Old Kentucky Home and to the left, at 57 North Spruce, stood the Belmont (later the Belvidere), which Wolfe refers to as "The Brunswick," According to Look Homeward, Angel, W. 0. Wolfe had participated in the construction of this house, and later had refused his wife's entreaties to collaborate 188 in its purchase. Wolfe also wrote of "The Brunswick" that one of his few childhood friends on Spruce Street was 46 the son of its proprietor in 1910 (see Appendix G), and that its ravenous guests were summoned to table by means of a Japanese gong. 189 Other boarding houses in the near vicinity stood along Woodfin Street, North Main, and College Streets, with names like Wyckoff Hall, the Lisbon, and the Ozark. Wolfe grew up surrounded by these and other boarding houses and doubtless was acquainted with many of the women who toiled within them. 190 During the years before Wolfe's departure for the University of North Carolina, Spruce Street was experiencing a rapid turnover in residents. A comparison of the City Directories for 1900, ·1906; 1910, and 1916 reveals that a very low proportion of those dwelling on the street were permanently settled. Of twenty individual residents listed in 1900, only six remained 47 in 1906. Of seventeen residents listed in 1906, only seven r emained in 1910. And of twenty-one residents in 1910 , only six remained in 1916 , the year of 191 Wolfe's departure for Chapel Hill. These directories also reveal the beginnings of an insidious encroachment by the commercial district onto the street in the wake of Asheville's accelerated growth, and encroachment which would at length comp l etely alter and disfigure the neighborhood. The changes which were occurr ing in the surroundings of the Old Kentucky Home during Wolfe ' s late pre-college years reflected changes which were taking place in the city as a whole. Wolfe, himself, was deeply disturbed by the heedlessly rapid growth and elemental transformations which were taking place in Ashevil le during the first three decades of this century. In the year of Wo l fe's birth Asheville had been a small town of 14,694 residents. By 1910 a slow growth had increased the population only to 18 , 762. But the city's growth had then begun to snowball; by 1 920 the population had reached 28,504,and by 1930 had soared to 50,193. In the wake of local and nationwide financial disasters, the momentum was then l ost; during the decade of the 1930s the population increased only to 51,310. 192 The foundations of economic disaster in Asheville were alr eady well laid before the Great Depression struck . Beginning about 1923 Wolfe began to evince a marked repugnancy toward the shallow commer cial ism and grasping materialism which was transforming Asheville almost beyond recognition. By 1926, Buncombe County , in the thrilling throes of a land boom, led the state in the assessed value of its real est ate. The f ollowing year the crash came. Asheville was financially devastated, and many of its leading cit i - 193 zens completely wiped out. Subsequent disasters befell the already stricken city in 1929 and 1930 in the form of widespread bank failures and • the consequent bankrupt cy and ignom.inious col lapse of local government. Four years after the publication of Look Homewa r d, Angel, in a letter to his mother, Wolfe summed up his feelings toward what had happened in Asheville: I dislike the whole booster ~boom-town-country club whoop~it-up kind of spirit because the whole thing is a lie and there is not a single decent and honest human value in it and everybody knows it .. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • II; • • • • • • I agree with you that it seems hard to see any immediate hope for Asheville. They invested their whole lives in a toy balloon and when the balloon burst, there was nothing left, not even the wind they pumped into it.l94 To its most famous son, the fortunes of Asheville were never matters of indifference. Throughout his career the city loomed prominently in his 195 thoughts and had continuing impact on his work. Fo l lowing two novels almost entirely concerned with the larger world into which he had escaped 48 as a young man, it is significant that, with his last and uncompleted novel, The Hills Beyond, Wolfe was returning, for subject matter, to the mountains and people from which he had sprung. By the time of Wolfe ' s departure for Harvard, the Old Kentucky Home had seen its best days. Like the neighborhood of which it was a part, it bad entered upon a protracted decline. After her initial trip to southern Florida in January of 1923, Mrs. Wolfe seems to have devoted very little time to the dwindling numbers of winter guests , Increasingly she was titil-lated by the glo~ing potentials of real estate speculation in Miami and Miami Beach, and thereafter repaired southward almost annually, drawn by the combined inducements of warmer weather and the chance of fabulous wealth. For many years she contemplated the construction of a modern apartment building in Miami, both as a sound investment and as a permanent resi.dence. 19b Needless to say this recurring scheme never materialized, and the Old Ken- • tucky Home suffered a decline in business due to patterns of -Asheville's development, local and national economic conditions, and the side effects of two world wars. During the erstwhile peak of the tourist season, in early July of 1917, W. 0. Wolfe wrote Ben that there were only eight boarders at the Old Kentucky Home, due primarily to World War 1. 197 Two weeks later the number of guests had risen to eighteen or twenty, but W. 0. Wolfe continued to forecast a bleak tourist season. 198 In June of 1931 Fred wrote Tom that there were only three or four in the house, and that their mother "so far has had scarecly [sic] any one this year."199 Just before Christmas of the same year, Mrs. Wolfe, in a letter to Tom, complained that well-to-do winter travelers would no longer suffer the infamous chill of the Old Kentucky Home, and that they were seeking more modern accomodations with steam heat. Consequently she was being left with an increasingly indigent and shiftless clientele, many of whom were out of work and able to pay little or nothing for their rooms. 200 In March of 1932 Mrs. Wolfe reported that there were no roomers in the house, that the place needed painting, 201 that the roof was leaking, and that some of the plumbing had burst. Her letter of two months later must have roused unpleasant memories of "drum-ming up trade" within her son's breast, as it exhorted him to promote mountain trips among his New York friends and promised an ample supply of Chamber of Commerce brochures to aid him in his endeavors. 202 By May of 1933 Mrs. Wolfe's business had grown so bad that she was accepting for 50¢ a night undesirable roomers whom in better days she would 203 have turned away. During the mid 1930s the Old Kentucky Home was no 49 longer bringing in sufficient money to cover the cost of heat and utilities, and Fred was having to contribute what he could to the upkeep of the house. 204 • Mrs. Wolfe recognized that during the financial boom of the early and mid 1920s Asheville bad begun to change in such a way as to place Spruce Street outside the normal lines of travel, and that the relentless transition of Spruce Street fromaresidential to a commercial area had rendered the surroundings less and less inviting to potential guests. By the winter of 1938 Mrs. Wolfe had begun to sleep on a bed in the parlor in an effort to keep warm in the delapidated and ill-maintained structure: I feel the cold but I dress like an Eskimo, to keep from suffering, but can ' t get any work done for I have to stay close to the fire here in the living room, even sleep here. This house was built for summer boarding house, now old, obsolete-could not be made comfortable besides [it] would cost more than to build a modern house.205 During the year just prior to his death, Wolfe described the Old Kentucky Home and his mother's attachment to it in a letter to Mrs. J. M. Roberts, who had inquired whether two young visitors to Asheville might not stay there : As for Mama~s house, there is certainly room there, but it is frankly in a delapidated state--an old house in a state of disrepair, which has long since passed its palmy days. Of course it is Mama ' s house and she loves it and sees it with a different eye, but these are the facts and I don't know whether it would be advisable for the young people to stay there or not.206 A constant and o:(ttimes solitary roomer at the Old Kentucky Home from 1922 to 1933 was the shadowy Theodore ("Ted") Salmer, a mild , softspoken, shabby, pitiable, and alcoholic man, who for eleven years helped look after things in the house, provided companionship for Mrs. Wolfe, and finally died at her feet of a massive hemorrhage one Sunday morning in 207 November of 1933. Family letters from the 1920s and earl y 1930s sometimes mention that "Old Salmer" has been left in charge of the house 50 51 during Mrs. Wolfe ' s absence or that he is currently the only roomer in the house. Fred Wolfe recal ls him fondly, and remembers that Mrs. Wolfe allowed Salmer to stay in the house for little or no payment. 208 Salmer appears fleetingly as "Gilmer" in Wolfe's story "The Return of the Prodi- 1 11ga . 209 Indeed, Wolfe's notebook for early 1934 reveals that he was contemplating, but never completed, an entire short story built around a 210 roomer at the Old Kentucky Home whom he planned to call "Gilmer." Upon hearing of Salmer's death, Wolfe wrote his mother in commiseration: A postcard from Mabel this morning informed me that Mr. Salmer died Sunday and that you were with him when he died . I know what a sad thing this must be for you and that you have lost a good friend . All of us I know feel sad about it because we all liked him. 211 Between 1917 and 1925 North Market Street was cut through behind the Old Kentucky Home, between North Main and North Spruce Streets, as the in-cursions of the downtown commercial district into the neighborhood con-tinued apace. As early as 1922 city planners envisioned drastic changes in the formerly residential section of which the Old Kentucky Home was a part. A comprehensive proposal of that year for Asheville ' s future devel-opment called for the establishment of a civic center to the north of Col-lege Street, between Spruce and Oak Streets, which was to contain a post office, a library, a federal building, and a community center. The proposed plan of development pointed out that the Spruce Street area was in close proximity to Pack Square, that it was outside the normal flows of traffic, that it was not yet highly developed, that it should be inexpensive to pro- cure, and that it was a suitable location for a large downtown hotel. 212 By 1930 the once residential North Spruce Street boasted a tire company, two automotive electrical shops, one new car dealer, two used car lots, two garages, and two funeral homes . To the rear and north of the Old Kentucky • Home, at the corner of North Market and Woodfin Streets, the AshevilleBiltmore Hotel had risen. 213 Of special significance in the subsequent history of the Old Kentucky Home was to be the erection of Harry's Motor Inn directly to its rear. On December 21, 1926 Harry D. Blomberg signed an agreement with Mrs. Wolfe to lease the Old Kentucky Home property be-tween the back of the house and North Market Street and to build upon it 214 a large one-story garage, subject to her approval of the plans . Blom-berg would later play a crucial role with regard to the house, and the unsightly garage which he constructed still stands pressed snugly against its backside. The trend of the neighborhood downward, once begun, was never reversed. Scattered brief descriptions of the house after the neighborhood's decline can be gleaned from several sources. In 1935 G. E. Dean, writing for The State, rendered the following description: It is the same rambling, unplanned, added-to, gabular affair with 18 or 20 rooms and painted on the outside a dirty yellow as described in the novel Look Homeward, Angel . But about it now there is something of a semblance of a dusty museum which never fails to fascinate readers who delight in seeing the book come to life.215 Dean noted the presence of numerous photographs in the parlor and the piano on the sun porch, over which were hung two of Thomas Wolfe's diplomas. 216 Another description dating from 1935 described the neighborhood as "shabby and non-descript." The house was said to have a "Tourists" sign on the front lawn, a faded "Old Kentucky Rome" sign over the front door, and to have "recently been painted a somewhat startling shade of yellow. " The parlor was reported to have a red carpet and lace curtains . A marble-top table held copies of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, and the walls were "decorated with innumerable photographs, and Tom's college 52 53 217 diplomas. " In August of 1940 a visitor noted that Mrs . Wolfe was taking roomers at $1.00 a day. The front yard was said to be grassless, flowerless~ and broom- swept . The house badly wanted paint and its overall appearance was one of "a cheap boarding house ." In the parlor were easy chairs and a davenport. An upright piano stood diagonally across one corner of the room and atop the piano was a photograph of Tom . Two enlarged tintypes of the twins, Grover and Ben , adorned one wall of the parlor. On the sunporch broken window panes had been replaced with newspapers . The central light fixture of the sun parlor was socketed for six bulbs but contained only two. The second of the two upright pianos stood diagonally across one corner of the sun parlor. In addition, the sun parlor contained a mission oak daven-port, a windowseat with cushions, and a table with potted plants. The over-all impression of the house was one of loneliness and bleakness , yet this writer was told by a Florida couple currently staying there that Mrs. Wolfe 218 "runs the cleanest boarding house in Asheville." Through the years Mrs. Wolfe clung to the old boarding house, which was drawing increasing numbers of visitors, if not roomers, as her son ' s novels gained increasing audiences. Ironically, the growth of public interest in Mrs. Wolfe and the Old Kentucky Home developed against a background of finan-ci al and legal reverses of a most serious aspect--reverses which would finally result in bankruptcy and loss of the house at public auction. The financial and legal odyssey which resulted at length in Mrs. Wolfe ' s loss of the Old Kentucky Home would be tedious to relate in every detail. Its even-tual loss was preceded and surrounded by labyrinthine legal and fina ncial entanglements which are extremely difficult to fully unravel and which as yet have received little or no attention, It is hoped that the following account of this tmportant episode in the history of the house ~1 steer a middle course between excessive brevity and unendurable tedium. 219 On October 17, 1922, some four months after the death of W. 0. Wolfe, Fred Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton were duly qualified as executors of his will and were entered upon the administration of his estate. They were empowered by provisions of the will to disperse $5,000 each to Effie , Frank, Mabel, Fred, and Tom, after which the balance of the estate was to devolve upon Mrs. Wolfe. Soon after the issuance of their letters testamentary, however, Fred Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton became inactive as executors, having only partially satisfied the provisions of the will. After remaining inactive until 1937, their letters were re-voked and the further administration of the W. 0. Wolfe estate was placed in the hands of S. J. Pegram by order of the clerk of Buncombe Superior Court. Soon after the death of W. 0. Wolfe, however, in the absence of 54 an on- going administration of the estate by its executors, Mrs. Wolfe had, in practice, taken control over her husband's estate , buying, sell ing, and investing freely, upon the mistaken assumption of her legal right to do so under the provisions of the will. There had followed numerous financial and property transactions on the part of Mrs . Wolfe, principally in Asheville and Miami, as she speculated wildly on the crest of real estate booms in both areas. By the summer of 1927 Mrs. Wolfe had overextended herself and felt that her financial affairs had grown too sizable and complex for her continued personal management. Moreover, the real estate bubbles in both Asheville and Miami had burst, and she had encumbered many of her holdings to such an extent that they were in imminent danger of foreclosure for debt. On June 10, 1927 Mrs. Wolfe entered into an irrevocable ''Living Trust" agreement with Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, whereby she vir tually sur- 55 220 rendered all personal control of her financial affairs. Thenceforward she exercised the power neither to loose nor bind those monies and proper-ties attached to the corpus of the trust estate by the original and supple-mental agreements . On June 14, 1927 the Old Kentucky Home was joined to the corpus of the agreement, thereby relinquishing control of the house which, even then, her son was in the process of immortalizing as he wrote 221 Look Homeward, Angel. There followed a complex and confusing series of deeds in trust, promissory notes, and loans which further complicated the legal ties which bound the Old Kentucky Home to Mrs. Wolfe's agreements with Wachovia. By January of 1937 the old boarding house (referred to in the various financial and legal documents as the "First lot") was heavily encumbered by four substantialmortgages and a lien against the house for 222 unpaid taxes. At length Mrs . Wolfe ' s failure to maintain the payment of her crushing indebtedness and her non-payment of city and county taxes over a number of years, for which Wachovia assumed responsibility as trustee, resulted in the issuance of a summons by Wachovia on January 4, 1937 against Mrs. Wolfe, the Wolfe children and their spouses, various city and county officials, private individuals with separate liens against Wolfe properties, Wachovia 223 Bank and Trust Company, Trustee, and, subsequently, against S. J. Pegram as administrator of the W. 0. Wolfe estate. From June 10, 1927 to March 1, 1937 the trust estate had realized f rom rents, notes, real estate sales, and miscellaneous sources $115,707 . 42 in income . Over the same period, however, the total disbursements necessary for the maintenance of the estate had totaled $138,169.11, so that the estate was deeply in debt to Wachovia as trustee. In addition, the estate was encumbered by unpaid liab:tli.ti.es of $126,663 . 66 composed of debts in- curred, interest due, and unpaid commissions. At the time the suit was initiated, Wachovia estimated the rental value of the Old Kentucky Rome, "a very old residence," to be no more than $50.00 a month. In early 1938 the court appointed referee was to gauge the value of the house and lot at $26,100. The Old Kentucky Home and seven other of Mrs. Wolfe's properties, six of which were unimproved, were the sole assets remaining to the estate, and Wachovia had brought the action after concluding that the estate's excess of liabilities over assets could only be expected to worsen. The Wolfes argued, in their answer to Wachovia's complaint and in several subsequent countersuits, that Wachovia had grossly underestimated the value of the estate's remaining assets and its original value, that Wachovia and Mrs. Wolfe had violated the provisions of W. 0. Wolfe's will, and had attacked the interests of his heirs by entering into the trust agreement in the first place, that Mrs. Wolfe had been unduly hastened and cajoled into making the agreement without being sufficiently informed of its consequences, and that the estate had been managed negligently and unskillfully, while wise advice and lucrative opportunities had gone begging. As a culmination of their contercharges, the Wolfes alleged that they were entitled to $150,000 in compensatory damages and $50,000 in punitive damages from Wachovia for its "gross and willful negligence'' and mismanagement. Following a series of legal maneuvers on both sides, the cause was referred to George A. Shuford, Referee, by order of Buncombe Superior Court Judge A. Hall Johnston on December 16, 1937 . Shuford began to hear evidence of January 31, 1938 and finally submitted his report on December 56 57 21 of that year. In his report Shuford concluded that the trust agreement had become "impossible of fulfillment" and that the estate was " totally insolvent. " He further found that the estate of W. 0. Wolfe had no viable interest in the litigat ion, that the Wolfe children and their spouses were not legitimate parties therein, and that Wachovia was entitled to sell the remaining assets of the estate for recovery of Mrs . Wolfe's defaulted debts. Shuford's original findings of fact and conclusions of law were appealled by the Wolfes, and the cause was referred to him a second t±me on January 19 , 1939 by Buncombe Superior Court Judge J. Will Pless, Jr . Referee Shuford ' s final report of January 28, 1939 was amended only slightly , in part to adjust its findings and concl usions to the Wolfe ' s counterclaims. As in his original report, Shuford found against the Wolfes on virtually every item of Wachovia ' s complaint. Furthermore, he exonerated the corporation from any all egat ions of negligence or wrongdoing and declared the Wolfe's counterclaim to have no merit in law. The Wolfes ' counterclaim was subsequently dismissed by Judge Pless on June 16, 1939. On August 17, 1939 Judge J. A. Rousseau of Buncombe Superior Court , following a jury verdict against the Wolfes, handed down a decision in favor of Wachovia which in effect accepted and confirmed Referee Shuford's reports. In his Judgement and Decree Judge Rousseau ordered Mrs. Wolfe to pay Wachovia the enormous sums due them by August 31. Failing that, Reed Kitchen was appointed commissioner with the authority to sell separately her encumbe r ed properties at the door of courthouse on behalf of the plaintiff creditor, Wachovia, which was to be permitted to participate in the bidding . In the event , Mrs. Wolfe proved unable to repay her onerous debts . There were no means at hand to save the Old Kentucky Home from the auctioneer~s gavel, and, on Monday, October 2, 1939, at • high noon, the old boarding house was sold to Wachovia Bank and Trust 224 Company for a total price of $32,876.65. The grueling and protracted legal battle and Mrs. Wolfe's eventual loss of the house involved the children in varying degrees. Almost cer-tainly there was some festering resentment against their mother for having squandered a portion of the inheritance due them from their father's estate. On the whole, however, the children were bound together in sym-pathy for their mother and in resentment of Wachovia and the "Living Trust." A number of letters between family members from the late 1930s convey this impression . As on most occasions, Fred was most unequivocal in his analysis of the situation, as evinced in his explanation of the "Living Trust" agreement to Tom: It is a very insidious and insecure and one-sided Hellish instrument which gave them full power to act and destroy and dissipate the entire estate. • All hers and our interests due to their mishandling and squandering of the estate have been destroyed. Their suit also pleads for recovery of Old Kentucky Home property street to street including Harry' s Motor Inn . Mama is holding due to occupancy of the premises, and can be evicted by court action based on the outcome of the suit. I started the thing since they were suing us and mama and will see it through, come what may, as we either fight back or else let them kick mamma out. 225 As early as February 15, 1937 Wolfe was expressing concern over the bank suit in a letter to his mother: Fred spoke to me in his letter of trouble which Wachovia Bank is now making for you concerning the house on Spruce Street. • • • Fred didn't tell me much about the Wachovia trouble, but I wish when you get time, some of you would write and tell me about it.226 By April 28, 1937, largely as a result of the law suit, he was beginning to weigh whether he should end his self-banishment from Asheville: I want to come down to see you and talk to you and find out what this Wachovia Bank business is all about . If there is anyway I can help, I want to do so. 58 It will be a very strange experience , I think, coming back to Asheville after all these years.227 59 In any event, Wolfe's concern and curiosity over the bank suit and the possible loss of the Old Kentucky Home proved important factors in his decision to return to Asheville in May of 1937~ after nearly eight 228 years of voluntary exile. On May 3, 1937 Wolfe stole silently into town and made his way to 48 Spruce Street. At the time of his arrival, his mother's legally imperiled boarding house boasted but a single 229 roomer, a school teacher . The prodigal novelist's return to Asheville was both successful and reassuring. So pleased and relieved was Wolfe by his hometown's reception in May that he resolved to spend the summer there following a brief return to New York. Raving arranged to rent a secluded cabin at Oteen from c artoonist, Max Whitson, Wolfe returned to Asheville from New York in 1 J 1 230 ear y u y. The summer proved a disastrous mistake . Wolfe had hoped to see his family and a few old friends, to get some writing done, to enjoy the peaceful privacy of the cabin, and to commune once again with the mountain surroundings he had loved since childhood. Instead the summer became a series of unending disturbances, uninvited visitors, phone calls, questions, autographs, notoriety, and family discord. At the Old Kentucky Home Tom and Frank clashed almost as soon as they met . Wolfe found the atmosphere of his mother's home so strained that he spent more time at Mabel's residence than on Spruce Street, thus exacerbating the anci~nt jealousy between sister and mother. The reunion of the volatile family members once again under the same roof produced a chain of small ex- 231 plosions which Wolfe found unpleasant and vexing in the utmost degree. Weary of the constant disturbances at the Oteen cabin , Wolfe moved secretly into the Battery Park Hotel in late August, in hopes of securing rest and so1 1. .tud e. 232 A few days prior to his final departure from Asheville, Wolfe moved into his mother's house on Spruce Street. 233 The last night Wolfe ever spent in the Old Kentucky Home must have been the night of September 4, 1937. He left for New York, never to see Asheville again, on the following day. 234 The summer in Asheville had been anything but pleasant. While Wolfe had been relieved to find the old animosities over Look Homeward, Angel subsided, the visit had proven extremely taxing physically, psychologi-cally, and emotionally. Old family wounds had been reopened, especially between himself and Frank, and Wolfe had resolved not to return to Ashe-ville . The bitter feelings he harbored on the subject of his homecoming were reflected in a letter to Fred: About the summer I spent at home, my first return in seven years or more, the less said the better. I'd like to forget about it if I could. I went home a very tired man, not only with all this trouble of Scribner's gnawing, but the pressure and accumulation of everything that has happened in the past two years . And when I left home I was as near to a breakdown as I have ever been. • • . It's too bad things had to turn out the way they did this summer: I had hoped that things would have changed: I had been away so long that I thought maybe they would be different. But I found out they were just the same, only worse: So I guess that's the end of me in Asheville. I'm sorry that you felt that I did not go around to the house enough this summer. I went all I could, but the situation there was such that I could not have gone more often than I did. • • • I have something in me that some people value, that has given some people happiness and pleasure, and that people think is worth saving. I think so too, and that is why I'm going to try to save it . I'm willing to do anything I can to help any one of my own kin in any way I can, but I'm not willing to waste my life and talent in an atmosphere of ruin and defeat, among people who can't be helped and who have been so defeated that they hate everything in life that has not been, and want to drag it down. I'm sorry to have to talk this way, but I have been driven to it. I've felt pretty sick and sore at heart when [sic, since] I left home, as it 235 has been so sad and so different from what I had hoped it would be. 60 61 Tragically, Wolfe would not long be able to save that "something" in him which had "given some people happiness and pleasure. " In little more than a year after his departure from Asheville, his life would be prematurely extinguished by miliary tuberculosis of the brain, in the thirty-seventh year of his age. Wolfe grew gravely ill in the mid summer of 1938, following his "Western Journey"--an extensive and grueling two-week sweep through the national parks of the western United States by automobile from June 21 to July 1. As he lay sick in Seattle, Washington, he was joined first by Fred and then by Mabel,
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Title | Thomas Wolfe and The Old Kentucky Home, Volume 1 |
Creator | Angley, Wilson. |
Contributor | North Carolina. Division of Archives and History. Research Branch. |
Date | 1975 |
Subjects |
Wolfe, Thomas, 1900-1938 Wolfe, Thomas, 1900-1938--Homes and haunts Wolfe family Thomas Wolfe Memorial (Asheville, N.C.) North Carolina--Biography |
Place | Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina, United States |
Time Period |
(1900-1929) North Carolina's industrial revolution and World War One (1929-1945) Depression and World War Two |
Description | Vol. 1 of 3 |
Agency-Current | North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources |
Rights | Research report see http://digital.ncdcr.gov/cdm/ref/collection/p16062coll6/id/5140 |
Physical Characteristics | 1 v. in various pagings : ill. ; 28 cm |
Collection | Research Branch. North Carolina Division of Archives and History |
Type |
Text Image |
Language | English |
Format | Reports |
Digital Characteristics-A | 24959 KB; 132 p |
Digital Collection |
Office of Archives and History Research Reports North Carolina Digital State Documents Collection |
Digital Format | application/pdf |
Audience | All |
Pres File Name-M | pubs_research_oldkentuckyhome1975_0001.tif-pubs_research_oldkentuckyhome1975_0132.tif |
Pres Local File Path-M | \Preservation_content\StatePubs\pubs_research\images_master |
Full Text | 'l."l--G1AS IDLFE AND THE OW KENTUCKY HGm Vol. I. }o)y~ Wilson Angley STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA Department of Cultural Resources Raleigh 27611 December I ~ 1975 James E. Holshouser, Jr. Governor .Grace J. Rohrer Secretary LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Division of Archives and History Larry E. Tise, Director The attached report on the Thomas Wolfe Memor ial State Historic Site w.as written by Mr . Wilson Angley, a candidate for the Ph . D. degree in b.ts.tory at The University of North Carol ina. Mr . Angley worked In excess of 720 bours on this report in the summer and fa I I of 1975. Th ~s Is to cert tfy that b.e has complied with alI of the terms of the agreement under wnlcn the report was compiled . It is as complete as funds and time permitted. A word of caution is extended to the reader concerning the transcribed documents inc luded in Appendix M. These t ranscriptions were ta ken from copies of poor quality microfi lm. They should be compared with the orlgtnal documents. in the Buncombe County Courthouse for accuracy. While I think Mr . Ang ley d i d a most doubt, additions and corrections to this of such observations so that they may be the report. commendable job , there wl l I be , no document . Please send to me coptes includ:;;e272-J ~orical Research Supervisor HISTORICAL RESEARCH REPORT THOMAS WOLFE AND THE OLD KENTUCKY HOME by Wilson Angley October 30, 197 5 Raleigh, North Carolina - TABLE OF CONTENTS I. THOMAS WOLFE AND THE OLD KENTUCKY HOME A. Text B. Footnotes C. Bibliography II. APPENDIXES A. List of Contents of the Old Kentucky Home prepared October 1 , 1919 B. Inventory To Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association, From the Heirs of Thomas Wolfe and Julia E. Wolfe , As of Date , May 3, 1949 C. Thomas Wolfe Memorial, Inventory - August 13, 1974 D. List of Thomas Wo l fe's personal property on Storage at MAMMOTH STORAGE WAREHOUSE, INC. - 410 - EAST 54th Str eet - NEW YORK CITY E . Miscellaneous Volumes from Library of W. 0 . WOLFE F . Books in the Wolfe Home Belonging to Various Members of the Wolfe Family G. Partial List of Other Boarding Houses on North Spruce Street from 1906 to 1916 H. Selected Bibliography of Wolfe's Published Writings I . THOMAS WOLFE HOUSE CITATIONS FROM LOOK HOMEWARD , ANGEL J. Miscellaneous Notes on Specit~c Items K. GeneralAssembly of North Carolina, 1973 Session , Senate Bill 1046: "An Act Appropriating Funds for the Establishment of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial as a State Historic Site." L . Exhibits M. Deeds 1. J. M. Israel toW. 0. Wolfe (1881), Buncombe County Deeds, 2. 3. 4. 5. 6 . 7. 8 . 9. 10. 11. Book 41, pp. 371-372 E. Sluder toT. Van Gilder (1881), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 41, pp. 392-393 T. Van Gilder to E. Sluder (1882), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 41, pp . 406 - 407 E. Sluder to C. Barnard (1884), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 46, pp. 183-185 W. W. Barnard to J. H. Herring (1884), Buncombe County Deeds , Book 46, pp. 361- 363 J. H. Herring to C. Barnard (1885), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 48, pp . 98 - 99 W. 0. Wolfe to J. Wolfe (1886), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 74, pp. 216 - 217 W. W. Barnard to A. J. Reynolds (1887), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 68 , pp . 206-208 C. V. Reynolds toT . M. Myers (1900), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 112, p. 543 T. M. Myers to J. Wolfe (1906), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 147, pp. 402-404 W. 0. Wolfe to J. R. Durrett (1920), Buncombe County Deeds , Book 237, p. 245. • TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued) 12. W. 0 . Wolfe toP. R. Moale (1920), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 242, p. 244 13. J . Wolfe to H. Blomberg (1926), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 374, pp. 543-548 14. J. Wolfe to Wachovia Bank (1927), Living Trust Agreement 15. J. Wolfe to Wachovia Bank (1927), Buncombe County Deeds , Book 377, p. 70 16. R. Kitchen to Wachovia Bank (1939), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 519, pp. 35- 36 . 17 . Wachovia Bank to H. Blomberg (1941), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 541, pp . 35 - 36 18 . H. Blomberg to J . Wolfe, et al. (1942), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 54 1 , pp. 521- 522 19. F. Wo l fe, e t a l. to J . Wolfe (1944) , Buncombe County Deeds , Book 565, pp. 51 0 - 513 20 . F. Wolfe, et al. to Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association (1949), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 671, pp. 285 - 288 21 . F. Wolfe, et al. to Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association (1949), Bailment Agreement 22 . Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association to City of Asheville (1958), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 798, p. 562 23. City of Asheville to State of North Carolina (1 975), Buncombe County Deeds, Book 1114, pp. 421-424 In the old house of time and silence there is something that creaks forever in the night, something that moves and creaks forever, and that never can be still.l And all of it is as it has always been: again, again, I turn, and find again the things that I have always known: the cool sweet magic of the starred mountain night, the huge attentiveness of dark, the slope, the street, the trees, the living silence of the houses waiting, and the fact that April has come back again • • • and again, again, in the old house I feel beneath my tread the creak of the old stair, the worn rail , the white-washed walls, the feel of darkness and the house asleep , and think, 'I was a child here; here the stairs, and here the darkness; this was I, and here is Time . ' 2 Thomas Wolfe's "house of time and silence" now commemorates the author whose life and art it so forcibly and endurably shaped . Eventu-ally Wolfe was to take upon himself the Herculean labor of translating this country ' s entire experience into prose , of capturing the very es-sence of America. Inevitably he failed to ach~evethis goal , but not be-fore having established for himself a permanent place among the foremost ranks of American writers, many of whose goals had also proven impossible of attainment : ••• among his and my contemporaries, I rated Wolfe first because we had all failed, but Wolfe made the best failure because he tried t he hardest to say the most •••• Man has but one short life to write in, and there is so much to be said, and of course he wants to say it all before he dies. My admiration for Wolfe is that he tried his best to get it all said; he was willing to throw away style, coherence, all the rules of preciseness, to try to put all the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin as it were . 3 But Wolfe never succeeded so well as when writing of his youth and of growing up in Asheville. When, in his writing, he departed from the Asheville setting and the recollections of his boyhood there, something of vividness, cohesion , and structure was surrendered. He never quite equa led Look Homeward, Angel, in which he poured forth the memories of his youth in a rich lyrical p r ose, replete with vivid sensory images . In his later work 1 he returned again and again to the scenes of his youth, and when he did so his work was the better for it: Wolfe was a man of tremendous powers of memory; it was his chief artistic resource. It made possible Look Homeward, Angel. But it was also his chief limitation. When his memory failed to provide him with both the raw material and the perspective for the work of art, the result was empty, lifeless prose.4 Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe 's editor at Scribner's and the man to whom Wolfe was most deeply indebted as a writer, realized the crucial molding influence of his early years: I think no one could understand Thomas Wolfe who had not seen or properly imagined the place in which he was born and grew up. Asheville, N.C. is encircled by mountains . The trains wind in and out through labyrinths of passes. A boy of Wolfe's imagination imprisoned there could think that what was beyond was all wonderful - different from what it was where there was not for him enough of anything. . • • • . . Wolfe was in those mountains - he tells of the train whistles at night - the trains were winding their way out into the great world where it seemed to the boy there was everything desirable, and vast, and wonderful. It was partly that which made him want to see everything, and read everything, and say everything . S Wolfe's youth was centered around two very different houses in Ashe- 2 ville: the one at 92 Woodfin Street where all the Wolfe children were born, the other at 48 Spruce Street which his mother operated as a boarding house and which Wolfe would later inunortalize as "Dixieland." Both houses were important in shaping Wolfe's personality, character, and work. Of the first something should be said because it exists no longer, of the second much must be said for it now stands as a memorial to his achievements. The Old Kentucky Home, now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, is situated on a plot of land linked to the very beginnings of the City of Asheville. On July 7, 1794 the prominent miller, John Burton, received a grant of land from the State of North Carolina for some two hundred acres in Buncombe County known as the "Town Tract." The boundaries of this original grant relate in the following way to the present-day city: the northern boundary ex-tended along a line from Charlotte Street, near its intersection with Clayton Street, westward [Sondley inadvertently says eastward] along Orange Street to a point east of Broadway [formerly North Main], thence southward to approximately Coxe Avenue, thence eastward to the eastern extremity of Atkin Street, and finally northward to Charlotte Street and 6 the beginning again. Thus the future Spruce Street and site of the Old Kentucky Home were embraced within the boundaries of the original grant to the "founder of Asheville," upon which the nucleus of the city was constructed. By 1840 Asheville had grown but little. The entire eastern portion of 3 the city, bounded on the west by North and South Main Streets [now Broadway and Biltmore Avenue], on the north by Woodfin Street and on the south by the southern boundary, boasted a mere eight residences, excluding slave quarters . Nearly the whole of this area of about three hundred acres was owned by James McConnell Smith, James W. Patton, Montraville Patton, Dr. 7 J. F. E. Hardy, Mrs. Rose Morrison, and Thomas L. Gaston. The immediate vicinity of the Old Kentucky Home seems to have belonged to James McConnell Smith and to have contained no private dwellings at all: Beginning at the corner of Woodfin Street, Mr. J. M. Smith ran up to the public square and back to Spruce Street and with it to Woodfin Street, owning all in this block, upon which there was no building save the old Buck Hotel and its belongings and one small two room frame dwellin§ about where Mr. Jenkins' store on North Main now [1905] stands . James McConnell Smith was born at the future site of Asheville on June 14, 1787, the son of Colonel Daniel S~th and Mary Davidson Smith. I He is believed to have been the first white child born in North Carolina west of the Blue Ridge. In 1814 he married Mary ("Polly") Patton, daughter of Colonel John Patton of Swannanoa. Smith throve in a nunber of business ventures in Asheville in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century and was the holder of extensive lands in Asheville, Buncombe County, and Georgia. He built and kept the old Buck Hotel, maintained a store and tanyard, ran several farms in the Asheville area, managed a ferry on the French Broad River, and later constructed and operated the county's first bridge over that stream. Until his demise on May 18, 1856 at the age of sixty-eight, Smith enjoyed the status of one of Asheville's wealthiest and most prominent citizens . 9 By 1881 the land upon which the Old Kentucky Home now stands was owned by one Erwin Sluder, a banker. By an indenture dated October 4 of that year Sluder and his wife, the former Julia A. Shepherd, conveyed a 4 large lot on Spruce Street to a prominent Asheville hardware merchant, Thomas Van Gilder, for $800. 10 Almost exactly a year later, on October 3, 1882, Sluder repurchased one half of this property from Van Gilder, leaving each in possession of identical lots on Spruce Street measuring ninety- five by 11 one hundred and ninety feet. It is on the lot repurchased by Sluder that the Old Kentucky Home now stands. Between Sluder's repurchase of October 3, 1882 and his subsequent sale of the property on January 13, 1884 , the pur- 12 chase price increased from $400 to $3 , 500. Almost certainly then the original house was erected in 1883. At the time the bouse was constructed, Asheville was a remote settle-ment of 3,874 people, 2,408 o f whom were white, 1,466 Negro . Five general merchandise stores c lustered about Courthouse or Public Square [now Pack Square]. The Bank of Asheville was the city's only such institution . The professions were represented by twenty-six attorneys, seven dentists, and eleven physicians. There were some thirty-eight streets, usually passable. Already Asheville accomodated its small but budding toutl$ttrade in six modest hotels . The city's moral and religious instruction was carried on in nine houses of worship (six white, three Negro) and in seven schools of various description. Asheville ' s Board of Trade, the future Chamber of 13 Commerce, had been in existence scarcely a year. By the early 1880s the stage was already being set for Asheville ' s 5 development as a major tourist and health resort. During much of the nine-teenth century Asheville had remained a remote and almost inaccessible mountain settlement . As early as 1795 a crude wagon road had been completed from the south through Saluda Gap to Asheville and on to the west and Knox- . 11 14 v1 e. A second road, dating from the early nineteenth century, proceeded northwestward from the Public Square along North Main Street, across the French Broad and into Tennessee. 15 These and other early roads to follow, however, were passable to only the most stalwart, long- suffering, and deter-mined of men. The completion then of the Buncombe Turnpike in 1827 from Saluda northward through Asheville, Warm Springs [now Hot Springs], and into Tennessee at Paint Rock was considered a major achievement in road- 16 building and considerably increased travel through western North Carolina. Between the completion of the Buncombe Turnpike and the advent of the railroads in the 1880s, prodigious droves of livestock and poultry were driven on foot southward from Tennessee and Kentucky through Buncombe, bound for markets in South Carolina and Georgia. Buncombites throve in supplying feed and accomodations to the migratory hordes of men and ani- 17 mals. They would soon turn their endeavors toward a more refined clientele. 6 Since soon after the turn of the nineteenth century , a trickle of summer visitors had begun to make their way from South Carolina and Geor-gia to the Asheville and Warm Springs areas in search of comfort and recreation. By 1820 Asheville was also gaining celebrity as a health resort , particularly for consumptives. The numbers of both the vaca-tioners and the migrant ailing were swelled appreciably by completion f h B b T . k 18 o t e uncom e urnp~ e. It was the advent of rail travel in the 1880s, however, which enabled Asheville to become a major resort and health center . At the close of the Civil War, Asheville had stood sixty miles distant from railheads in Morgan-ton, North Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina, and Greeneville, Tennessee. The long-delayed Western North Carolina Railroad from Salisbury through Statesville, Morganton, and Old Fort, finally broke through to Asheville in 1880. Connections with the south followed in 1886 with the completion of 19 the Asheville-Spartanburg line. Among other developments, the opening of the Battery Park Hotel in 1886 and the completion of George W. Vander-built's palacial Biltmore House in 1895 signaled Asheville's triumphant ar-rival on the social and financial scene, and set in motion forces of growth and change which would not spend themselves until the late 1920s. Several of those associated with the future Old Kentucky Home played significant parts in laying the financial and mercantile foundations for a growing Asheville; others, like Julia E. Wo l fe, who followed them, opened its doors to the rapidly increasing numbers flocking to Asheville in search of health and recreation . Among the former was Erwin Sluder, the man who erected the original house on Spruce Stre~t . His gravestone in Asheville~s Riverside Cemetery indicates that he lived from 1824 to 1885. By the time of the housets construction he had long since established himself as one of western North Carolina\s lead~g p~~y~te bankers, haying set up for busi- 20 ness on the Public Square soon after the Civil war. The Census of 1880 listed Sluder as a banker, age fifty-six , with four children. Listed as members of his household were, besides his immediate family, a niece, two 21 boarders (a teacher and a dentist), and two servants. In 1884 he took as his partner W. W. Barnar d . 22 Barnard was Sluder ' s son- in-law , the husband of his eldest child Cordelia (Cordie) . 23 On January 13, 1884 Sluder sold the property on Spruce Street to his 24 daughter and son-in-law for $3,500. Apparently, however, the couple had been living in the house since its completion, as indicated by Asheville's first City Directory, published in October of 1883. 25 Erwin Sluder's residence , on the other hand, was given as North Main Street in 1883. 26 Very probably Sluder never resided in the house he had built. By 1883 he was a prominent Asheville citizen in the fifty-ninth year of his age with a well established household; his daughter, Cordie, according to the Census of 1880, would have been nineteen the year the house was built; and it was the Barnards , not the Sluder s, who were listed as residents of Spruce Street in 1883. It is reasonable to suppose , then, that the house was built for the newly married couple by Erwin Sluder and sold to them the following January shortly before his death. 7 W. W. Barnard (1858-1944) 27 was a leading buyer and warehouseman during Asheville's thriving tobacco marketing period in the 1880s. 28 Having been made a partner in his father-in-law's banking concern in 1884, he continued to prosper in that profession after Sluder ' s death the following year . By 1890 he had risen to the vice-presidency of the National Bank of Asheville, and from 1892 to 1896 served as president of that bank. 29 Barnard and his wife possessed the property until April 1: 1884, when, for some reason, 30 they sold the house to one J. H. Herring for $3,600. Of Herring little can be learned except that in 1887 he was carrying on a trade in shoes and boots in the Herring and Weaver Shoe Store at 30 South Main Street . 31 After less than a year, on March 14, 1885, Herring relinquished the house 32 to Cordie Barnard for $3,390 . By 1890 Herring vanished from the city directories, presumably having died or moved away. From March 14, 1885 until July 13, 1889 the house remained in the Barnards' hands. The City Directory of 1887 indicates that, after the death of Erwin Sluder, several members of his family moved into the Spruce 33 Street house with the Barnards. The next change of ownership came with the Barnards' sale of the house to Mrs. Alice Johnston Reynolds, a widow, on July 13, 1889 for the muchincreased purchase price of $7,500. 34 It should be noted that the original house had apparently seen a massive addition during the period of the Barnards' residence, the price of the house having more than doubled between 1885 and 1889. It was during the period of Mrs. Reynolds' ownership that the house definitely began to be operated as a boarding house . Within one year after her purchase, the City Directory of 1890, in the classified ads, listed the residence as a boarding house '~y permission . " 35 Under Mrs. Reynolds' personal proprietorship and that of others to whom she apparently leased the house, 48 Spruce Street took in boarders from 1890 to 1900. An 1893 information booklet for the promotion of tourism contained a glowing advertisement for Mrs. Reynolds' boarding house. 36 Three years later, though still referred to as the Reynolds, the house was accepting board-ers under the proprietorship of Mrs. Leah I. Drake, whose advertise- 8 • ment was inserted in the City Directory of 1896. 37 Subsequent proprietors during the period of Mrs. Reynolds' ownership were Mrs. W. 0 . Hudson in 189938 and Mrs. Mollie C. Wadsworth in 1900. 39 By July of 1900 Mrs. Reynolds had died·; her brother, Dr . Carl V. Reynolds, acting in the capacity of executor of her estate, sold the house on the twenty seventh day of that month to the Reverend Thomas M. 40 Myers and his long-suffering wife, Mary, for $5,000. At the ti.me of this transaction, Dr. Reynolds was carrying on his medical practice in the Barnard Building in Asheville. 41 He subsequently went on to distinguish 42 himself in the practice of medicine on both the local and state levels. The Reverend T. M. Myers, from whom Julia Wolfe was to purchase the Old Kentucky Home, seems to have been a colorful and restless man with more than three decades in the service of God to his credit . Re was, however, flawed by a propensity for strong drink and by a dubious mental constitution, at least in his declining years . Mrs. Wolfe later recalled that he was A man from Kentucky . He was a lecturer , a Campbellite preacher [he is sometimes remembered, with less likelihood , as having been a Methodist], and a very brainy man at one time, but he 43 snapped several times they said, and had to go to an institution. In August of 1898, two years before his purchase of the Spruce Street property, the Reverend Myers purchased a large farm near Asheville which he dubbed the "Old Kentucky Home," the name he would soon after confer on the boarding house. 44 For reasons best known to himself, Foster A. Sondley re-corded the Reverend Myers' undistinguished exclamation alone, of all those 9 which must have found voice on that day in 1887, when Asheville's first elec-tric street railway car lurched forward, aided by neither animal nor steam power, on its maiden journey from the Public Square southward to Biltmore. 45 Wolfe later drew the Reverend Myers' portrait as the "Reverend Wellington Hodge" in Look Homeward, Angel, making mention of some of the haunting memo-ries which Myers had of the Old Kentucky Home and which helped motivate his sale of the house to Mrs. Wolfe. 46 The Old Kentucky Home was operated by several proprietors during the six years of Myers" ownership. In 1900, the year of Myers' purchase of the house and the year of Thomas Wolfe's birth, 10 the proprietor was Mrs. Mollie C. Wadsworth. 47 In August of 1902 Myers leased the house to one C. J. Jeffress for $900 with an option to buy.48 In 1904 Edward T. and Mary B. Green were acting as proprietors; 49 and in 1906, the year of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase, Thomas W. and Elsie C. King kept the house for boarders. 50 For more than two decades after the construction of their future house on Spruce Street, the Wolfe residence was located a short distance away at 92 Woodfin Street. Some account must be given of the Woodfin Street house, for it was there that all of the Wolfe children were born, it was there that the Wolfes' family life most nearly approached congeniality and cohesiveness, and it was there that Thomas Wolfe's fondest memories of childhood originated. The man who was to build the Woodfin Street house with his own hands, William Oliver Wolfe, was born near York Springs, Pennsylvania on April 10, 1851, the son of Jacob Wolf (W. 0. later added the "e") and the former Eleanor Jane Heikes (or Heikus). Shortly after the Civil War, he had struck out for Baltimore, where he had found employment with Sisson and King's Monument Works. During the years of his apprenticeship, Wolfe lived in a Baltimore boarding house, the Streeter Hotel, from whose irascible proprietor, Joe Streeter, he may have acquired some of his relishment for the hyperbolic, the dramatic, and the profane. Upon completion of his apprenticeship in Baltimore, the stone cutter came south with his younger brother, Elmer, to work on the column friezes of the capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina. In something under a year, the work completed, the two moved northward to Raleigh, where they applied their craft to the construction of the state insane asylum and other buildings currently under way. By 1871 his brother Elmer had departed for Ohio, and W. 0. Wolfe had established his own place of business in Raleigh at the corner of South Blount and East Morgan Streets. On October 9, 1873, the twenty- two year old Wolfe and a nineteen year old Raleigh girl, Hattie Watson, were joined in wedlock. Of this, the first of Wolfets three ill-fated marriages, little can be learned, save that it soon ended in divorce . In 1879 Wolfe married Cynthia Hill, the daughter of his landlady and eight years his senior. Shortly thereafter, during theLr first year of marriage, Cynthia's worsening tubercular condition resolved the couple to leave Raleigh and take up residence in Asheville. Arriving in Asheville some time before her husband, Cynthia Wolfe set up as a milliner. W. 0. 51 followed as soon as his business affairs in Raleigh were settled. The Census of 1880, besides W. 0 . and Cythia Wolfe, lists his mother-in- law, Mrs. Allen, his brother Wesley, a plasterer, and one Negro servant as members of theW. 0. Wolfe household. 52 Julia Wolfe would later recall that W. 0. and Cynthia Wolfe had lived briefly in two rented rooms on North Main Street before construction of the Woodfin Street house. 53 The information in the Census of 1880, however, indicates that larger quarters must have been occupied at that ttme. In any event, W. 0 . and Cynthia Wolfe seem to have been unable to 11 • locate a house which suited them, and decided to purchase a piece of land and erect their own house . On October 10, 1881 W. 0. Wolfe purchased the lot on Woodfin Street from J. M. and S. E. Israel for $300. 54 With the help of several men whom he had hired, Wolfe completed the building of the house soon after purchase of the land. But Cynthia Wolfe's health did not improve as hoped. After less than three years in the house her husband had built for her, she passed away on February 22, 1884. 55 During the brief period that Cynthia Wolfe operated her millinery shop in Asheville , she bacame acquainted with Julia Elizabeth Westall, the future Julia E. Wolfe. Indeed, it was in Cynthia ' s shop that the future marriage partners first met. Sometime thereafter, probably in the summer of 1884, a more serious acquaintance was set on foot when the redoubtable stone cutter was accosted in his shop by Miss Westall, a school teacher and part- time bookseller, in search of a new customer. Julia E. Westall had been born at Swannanoa in 1860, the product of Major Thomas Casey Westall's second marriage . She was almost entirely self-educated in her early youth, having received little or no formal schooling on the primary and secondary levels. After a year and a half's attendance at Asheville Female College and Judson College in Hendersonville, she was able to establish herself as a rural school teacher in Yancey and later Mitchell counties 9 and supplemented her income by selling books during the summer . 56 Thus the union which would one day produce one of America~s great novelists was begun on a basis of buying, selling, lending, and discussing books. Mrs. Wolfe later recalled that her future husband had initiated his proposal, in the parlor of the Woodfin Street house, by explaining 12 • 13 that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Allen, was soon to return to Raleigh and that he was therefore obliged either to remarry or break up housekeeping for want of assistance. Wolfe's pragmatic solution was not immediately accepted, but at length his presumption and persistence won her over. On January 14, 1885, at the home of the bride's father, the two were joined in holy matri- 57 mony. It was to prove , as Andrew Turnbull so aptly described it, "an epic misalliance."58 A numerous progeny soon began to issue forth. The first child, Leslie, a girl who died in infancy , was born October 18, 1885, only nine months and four days after the wedding. Seven other children and numerous miscarriages followed, all placing in extreme jeopardy the allegation of impotency report- 59 edly leveled at W. 0. Wolfe by his first wife, Hattie Watson. Like Lesl ie before them, all the Wolfe children were born in Julia Wolfe's upstairs bedroom at the front of the house: Effie on June 7, 1887, Frank on November 25, 1888, Mabel on September 25, 1890, the twins--Grover and Benjamin--on October 27 , 1892, Fred on July 15, 1894, and Thomas Clayton on October 3, 190o. 60 It was in the Woodfin Street rather than the Spruce Street house that Mrs. Wolfe prepared the sumptuous breakfasts and W. 0. prepared the Satanic fir es described with such nostalgic vigor by his youngest child: 1--; Of, ever to wake at morning knowing he was there! To feel the fire full chimney- throat roar up a - tremble with the blast of his terrific fires, to hear the first fire crackling in the kitchen range, to hear the sounds of morning in the house, the smells of breakfast and the feeling of security never to be changed ! Oh, to hear him prowling like a wakened lion below, the stertorous hoarse frenzy of his furious breath; to hear the ominous muttering mounting to faint howls as with infuriating relish he prepared the roaring invective of the morning's tirade, to hear him muttering as the coal went rattling out upon the fire, to hear him growling as savagely the flame shot up the trembling chimneythroat, to hear his giant stride racing through the house prepared now, storming to the charge , and the well-remembered howl of his awakened fury as springing to the door-way of the backroom stairs he flung it open, yelling at them to awake . 61 Only occasionally in later years would he ignite a conflagration in the Old Kentucky Home sufficient to kindle memories of his previous efforts . 62 It was in emulation of her absent father that Effie came near to burning the Woodfin Street house to the ground. In the late 1890s the restless and "far-wandering" W. 0. Wolfe had left Asheville for a three-month jaunt to California. Mrs. Wolfe had gone downtown to her husband ' s place of business, having left Effie charged with the responsibility of keeping a low fire burning in the kitchen range. Following her father's examples , she doused the slackening flame with a can of kerosine, drawn from the drum on the back porch. The ensuing blaze badly damaged the rear of the house on both £loors and , for a while, bade fare to destroy the entire structure. The frugal and enterprising Mrs. Wolfe set carpen-ters to the task of rebuilding almost at once. With the help of her brothers, W. H. and J. M. Westall (both in the building supply and con-struction business) the work was completed according to the original plan in a matter of weeks. W. 0. Wolfe was told nothing of the incident until his return to Asheville. 63 Mrs. Wolfe, in fact, had not had her husband's house repaired, but her own . Ironically , the house referred to as "Papa's house" or in Thomas Wolfe ' s writings as "Gant's house," had been purchased by Mrs. Wolfe from her husband on October 26, 1886 for $2,000. 64 Moreover, it appears that Mrs. Wolfe took some few boarders into the house the summer of 1886, following the death of their first child.65 Happily this precedent was not followed thereafter in the Woodfin Street house; but it can be seen as a harbinger of things to come eighteen years later with Mrs. Wolfe~s boarding 14 • house venture in St. Louis and twenty years later with the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home. The Woodfin Street home was a well-constructed two- story structure of seven rooms. It was said to be the first house in Asheville with a "cement finish, " a finish designed to simulate brownstone. A large front porch, high off the ground, stretched across the front and down both sides of the house. Beneath the house was a dirt- floored cellar used for the storage of fruits and vegetables. The first floor contained four rooms, including the kitchen. As one entered the downstairs hall from the front porch, the parlor was on the right . It contained a suit of upholstered furniture, a what-not filled with shells, curios, and carved marble, a mantel piece adorned by figurines, and a marble top table , above which 15 was suspended a pull-down crystal lamp. The floor of the parlor was covered with a tan Belgian carpet decorated with gold and pink rose clusters. In the ceiling of the parlor and the hallway were medallions fashioned by W. 0. Wolfe. To the rear of the parlor was the living room, which had been originally a bedroom. A side door opened from the living room onto the side porch. Across the hall, opposite the parlor, was the dining room, which contained a long extendable table capable of seating fourteen people. Behind the dining room was the kitchen where the fondly remem-bered Woodfin Street meals were prepared. Upstairs were three bedrooms . Mrs. Wolfe' s stood over the parlor at the front of the house . Mr. Wolfets room was opposite hers, across the small hallway. The childrents room was on the right rear of the house above the living room. A staircase evidently led down from the children~s room to the back porch. The house was heated entirely by four fireplaces, one in each of the three rooms downstairs, excluding the kitchen, and the fourth in Mrs. Wolfets bedroom upstairs . The house contained no plumbing. 66 The front yard on Woodfin Street was small but verdant. Steps led down from the lofty front porch to a marble walkway, which spanned the short distance of about thirty feet from the foot of the steps to the wood and later iron fence. The front yard was fifty feet in width and was heavily planted in a variety of flowers and shrubs . As a general rule the children were not allowed to play in the front yard, but the spacious back yard afforded ample opportunity for play. Although only fifty feet wide, the back yard ran back more than two hundred and fifty feet from the street and featured a variety of fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and a swing for the children. A further attraction of the back yard on Woodfin Street was the one room playhouse which now stands to the left rear of the Old Kentucky Home. The playhouse was built by W. 0. Wolfe with pine lumber about the turn of the century, and was placed behind the right rear or northeast corner 67 of the main house. A plank walkway led from the front of the main house to the doorway of the playhouse. The younger children spent many hours there, especially during inclement weather or on Sunday afternoons when W. 0. Wolfe craved surcease of noise within the main hous·e. The play-house contained chairs, a couch., a stove, an atlas, a large blackboard, and Mrs. Wolfe ' s old Estey organ, which she had obtained before her mar-riage while teaching school in Mitchell County. Tom especially enjoyed the playhouse, seeking there the solitude denied ~ elsewhere. When stay- 16 ing on Woodfin Street the children could jump from the window of the back bedroom onto the roof of the playhouse and from there to the ground below. 68 The Woodfin Street house was situated between the J . M. Israels ' modest house on the west and the grand brick house of the E. W. Hazzards on the east. It was in the driveway of the Hazzards house that the young Thomas 69 Wolfe was near ly run over and killed by a horse and delivery wagon. But more than a driveway separated the Wolfe's from the Razzards; the two fami-lies lived on different planes. The Hazzards were a wealthy South Carolina 17 family from near Charleston. Normally they rented the house to others while living elsewhere. For several years during Wolfe's early youth the house was occupied by the Oliver Cromwell famil y of Philadelphia, which had come to Asheville for Mr. Cromwell ' s failing health. The three Cromwell child-ren were frequent playmates for the younger Wolfe children. James Cromwell would one day marry Doris Duke, and his sister Louise was to become the 70 fir st wife of Douglas MacArthur. The young Thomas Wolfe's c losest friends on Woodfin Street were Charles Perkinson, son of the T. J. Perk.insons across the street and Max Israel, son of the J . M. Israels next door . Though turbulent even in the early years, Wolfe's childhood was at its best on Woodfin Street. Julia Wolfe, however, was never entirely at ease on Woodfin Street . There she was constantly reminded, at times by W. 0 . Wolfe in no uncertain terms, that the house had been built for another woman . Indeed, some of the furniture and bric- a-brac in the house had been brought by Cynthia Hill from Raleigh. W. 0 . Wolfe may have promised to build a house for his new wife on a large lot he had acquired on Merriman Avenue; if so , the promise 71 was never kept. Julia Wolfe had ample cause for discontent~ent under her husband's roof , besides the c onstant reminders of his former marriage. In real life W. 0. Wolfe was a physically imposing, rather impeccable, man of six feet four inches, with a decided proclivity for oratory, hyper-bole, and genial profanity . There was about him a feeling of zestful restlessness, unpredictable expansiveness, and undifferentiated frus tration. Had he chosen another path, he might well have made his mark as an actor or lawyer. Though lacking in formal education, he had acquired an appreciation of cultural and intellectual pursuits. A man of gifted memory, Wolfe indulged his flair for the dramatic with long passages of poetry and scripture. In many ways he was an appealing and colorful man . But his periodic drunkeness and riotous adultery , together with occasional threats of physical violence against his wife and her to·o numerous offspring were, for Mrs. Wolfe, recurring causes of embarrassment, degradation, and anxiety. For his part, the Olympian W. 0 . Wolfe could not abide his wife ' s small mindedness, her unpleasant and frenetic mannerism of speech and gesture, her growing acquisitiveness, her inchoate mysticism, her petty selfishness, and her suffocating niggardliness. Moreover, Mrs. Wolfe was of a fiercely self-reliant nature, and, under the circumstances, fostered a desire to assert her indpendence. At length the unhappy un.ion was to be severed in such a way as to allow Mrs. Wolfe an opportunity both to flee her husband's hearth and give vent to her mounting mania for real estate speculation. The eventual purchase of the Old Kentucky Home and the consequent destruction of a cohesive family life should be seen against the background of both the growing gulf between the ill-mated marriage partners and Asheville ' s mushrooming growth as a tourist and health resort. By 18 the early years of this century Asheville was attracting thousands in search of health and recreation . Asheville was becoming a town on the make, and had begun the transformation which its most famous son would later deplore: New people were coming to town all the time, new faces were being seen upon the streets. There was quite a general feeling in the air that g r eat events were just around the corner, and that a bright destiny was in store for Libya Rill. It was a time when they were just hatching from the shel l , when the place was changing from a little isolated mountain village, lost to the world, with its few thousand native population, to a briskly moving modern town, with railway connections to all parts, and with a growing population of wealthy people who had heard about the beauties of the setting and were coming there to live.72 Hotels and boar ding houses were rapidly proliferating to meet the growing demand for accomodations. As early as 1898 the Ashevill e Board of Trade was promoting tourism and describing the boarding houses of the area in glowing terms : Scores of home - like boarding houses are here; excellent modern f l ats and beautiful private residences, occupied by r efined, cultured people, many of whom are persons of wealth.73 19 By about 1910 the Board of Trade was claiming nineteen hotels for Asheville with rates ranging from $1 . 00 to $6.00 a day, in addition to the "scores of homelike boarding houses [which] offer choice accomodations at from $6 . 00 to 14 . 00 per week."74 It was estimated at this time that " The hotel and boarding house capacity approaches an aggregate of 12,000 to 15,000 ."75 By 1920 , the effective end of Thomas Wolfe's life in Asheville, the Board of Trade was advertising hotel rates from $2.50 to $10 . 00 a day and up , while boarding houses were said to offer room and board ranging from 76 $15.00 to $25.00 a week. Accomodations at the Old Kentucky Home we r e never to fetch such a price. Julia Wolfe's purchase of the Old Kentucky Home was preceded by experience as a boarding house keeper during the summer of 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair. According to one of Mrs. Wolfe's accounts, the initiative for her undertaking the St . Louis venture had come in part from her husband. By this account, Mr. Wolfe had taken the Keeley Cure • for alcoholism about 1901 and for several years had been ab l e to control his drinking. Yet he had grown increasingly restive beneath the burden of his large family and had encouraged his wife to bring in some additional income. This, she later claimed, had been an important factor in her decision. A further inducement for Mrs. Wolfe, according to one account, was the reported success enjoyed by Governor Elias Carr's sister as a boarding house keeper during the Chicago Worldls Fair of 1893. 77 In the spring of 1904 Mrs. Wolfe journeyed to St. Louis with all of the children except Frank and Effie, who remained in Asheville with their father . She had taken a six-month lease on the house of Dr. Paul Paquin of St . Louis, who was to be out of town for a year and whose brother, also a physician, Mrs . Wolfe was acquainted with in Asheville. The house was located at 5095 Fairmont Avenue, on the corner of Fairmont and Academy Street. Until November Mrs. Wolfe operated the residence as the North Carolina House for those visiting the World•s Fair. Many of her tenants · were North Carolinians. Her otherwise profitable St . Louis venture was marred and terminated by the death of Grover there on November 16. Upon notification of the boy's death, W. 0. Wolfe came out to St. Louis and the family returned to Asheville with the body . The death of Grover, like the death of Ben fourteen years later, left a definite mark on the life of the Wolfe family. From time to time in subsequent years, W. 0. Wolfe would denounce his wife's St. Louis enterprise, holding her responsible for the death of the boy whom both regarded as the brightest and most promising of the children. 78 The death of Grover and the subsequent recriminations placed further strains on Julia Wolfe's tolerance for the Woodfin Street house and 20 • 79 helped assure her permanent departure . Soon after the family ' s return from St. Louis, Mrs. Wolfe began looking for a likely boarding house in-vestment. Late in the summer of 1906 one Jack Campbell, a real estate agent, came by the house on Woodfin Street to inform Mrs. Wolfe of the house which the Reverend Myers was placing on the market. After being shown through the house by Mrs. Myers, Julia Wolfe approached her husband on its purchase. The harassed W. 0. Wolfe seems to have acquiesed in a spirit of resignation and perhaps relief: uJack, she wants it, make the papers out to her. 80 If she is satisfied , I dontt care. " According to Mrs. Wolfe's recollections, the papers for transfer of ownership were drawn up and signed the following. day in the offices of the law firm of Bernard and Bernard . At the time of the purchase, the house already contained nineteen boarders paying $8 . 00 a week. 81 The Reverend Myers had 21 already dubbed the house the Old Kentucky Home, in honor of his home state, 82 and requested that the name be retained. Only occasionally, during the temporary proprietorship of short-term lessees, was the name ever changed ther eafter. The deed of August 30, 1906 conveyed ownership of the Old Kentucky Home to Julia E. Wolfe for a purchase price of $6,500 . The property was described as being free of all encumbrances "excepting certain unpaid paving and sewer assessments," for work that had been recently done and f h . h M W lf d .hili 83 f $2 000 or w 1c r s . o e assume respons1 ty. A down payment o , was required. By this time Mrs. Wolfe had accumulated $1,700 for the purchase of a boarding house, including the profit of about $500 from the summer in St. Louis. The balance was to be paid off at a rate of $500 every six months . W. 0. Wolfe was prevailed upon to lend hts wife the balance of the money down required, and, in l ess than a week after 84 the sale, she took actual possession of the house. • 22 Quietly but decisively the family had been cleft in twain. There-after its members were to shuttle for many years between two houses, neither of which was a home. At first and briefly, Mrs. ~olfe exerted some effort to operate her newly acquired business while remaining on Woodfin Street, walking back and forth between the two houses in the early morning before breakfast and late evening after supper. The family adapted to this arrangement after a fashion by taking their lunches and suppers at the Old Kentucky Home. After only about six weeks of commuting between the two houses, Mrs . Wolfe was afflicted with a seriously infected leg and began to sleep in the boarding house. For some weeks she was obliged to conduct her boarding house business from a wheel chair; but she did not return again to Woodfin Street and her husband. Thus, from about October of 1906 the family bonds were permanently severed. Mrs . Wolfe later claimed that, at first, her husband did not seem to mind her living apart and had even seemed to relish his intercourse with the boarders. If this is true, his attitude altered quickly and permanently, as she later owned : But as time went on he declared that I had made a mistake in breaking up the home which I admit was true, scattering the family, trying to live in two houses.85 For more than a decade after the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, the children drifted back and forth between the two houses, depending on whim, domestic circumstances, and the tourist season. A study of the Ashe-ville city directories for the years 1906 to 1918 unfolds a bewildering and frenetic alteration of living arrangements, remarkable for a single family. Family correspondence of the period reveals a similar picture. Addresses changed irregularly with the years and seasons, and it was not unusual for members of the family, writing from out of town, to express uncertainty as to where the various family members were currently to be found. 23 The chief source of information for Thomas Wolfets youth and for life within the Old Kentucky Home must, of course, be Look Homeward 1 Angel. Des - pite Wolfe's disingenuous evasiveness on the point and the recurring dis-claimers of other family members, the novel's depiction of people, places, and events is remarkable for its accuracy and detail. Wolfe was very tender to the accusation that he was merely transcribing actual memories into prose , feeling that such an admission would seriously undermine and diminish his role as a creative and imaginative artist. But one thing after another from the book can be or has been verified. The experiences of Wolfe's protago-nist, Eugene Gant, and of Wolfe himself are, on the whole, virtually iden- 86 tical. Drawing on his prodigiously retentive memory, Wolfe was able to translate the recollections of his youth with amazing vividness and detail: We Wolfes, Papa and Mama and each of us children, I think, have all been possessed of extraordinary powers of remembering. Much of Tom's success as a writer, in my opinion , is attributable to the fact that he never forgot anything •.•• he could sit down and recall in elaborate detail those things he had experienced, what he had seen or heard or tasted or smelled or felt, and put them realistically on paper. Tom's was truly a photographic memory. 87 In a letter to his mother from Harvar d, written three years before he began Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe wrote that he had some memories of childhood before Grover ' s death in 1904, but that after that time he was able to trace his childhood in memory "step by step. " 88 Thirteen years later, in The Story of a Novel, Wolfe alluded to the potentials of his memory as a resoruce for his art: The quality of my memory is characterized, I believe, in a more than ordinary degree by the intensity of its sense impressions, its powers to evoke and bring back the odors, sounds, colors, shapes, and feel of things with concrete vividness.89 MOreover, Wolfe's powe r s of recalling the surroundings of his youth were matched by his ability to recollect the faces, characteristics, and personalities which filled thefuJ • • • the winter boarders in a little boarding house down south twenty years ago; Miss Florrie Mangle, the trained nurse; Miss Jessie Rimmer, the cashier at Reeds drug store; Doctor Richards, the clairvoyant; the pretty girl who cracked the whip and thrust her head into the lion's mouth with Johnny J. Jones Carnival and Combined Shows . 90 Serious students of Wolfe's life and work have found Wolfets auto-biographical fiction approached literal truth most closely in Look Home-war d, Angel . Elizabeth Nowell, long personally and professionally asso-ciated with Wolfe and his most comprehensive biographer , used Look Home - wa r d, Angel as the chief source of information for his early life , because 91 it was " so obviously autobiographical." His second and final editor , Edward Aswell of Harper's, declared the nove l "The most literall y auto-biographical of his books. Nine years after Wolfe ' s death, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner ' s, the man responsible for the publication of Wolfe's first and best novel, recalled his initial recognition of its factual basis : I remember the horror with which I realized, when working with Thomas Wolfe on his manuscript of ''The Angel, t• that all of these people were almost completely r eal, that the book was liter all y autobiographical.93 One Wolfe schol ar familiar with the events and sur roundings of his child-hood has concluded that: There are many more than 300 characters and places mentioned by name or described in Look Homeward , Angel, and prob ab ly there is not an entirely fict itious person, place , or incident in t he whole novel. • • • Those migrant boarders a nd tourists who came to the Old Kentucky Home, rocked on the front porch for a spell , and moved on are seldom identifiable. Wolfe remembered them, but townspeople do not; and the minor exploits of boarders are rarel y recorded by the papers.94 It was because of the penetrating and scathing accuracy of Wolfe ' s portrait of Asheville that Look Homeward, Angel evoked such widespread furor. Two decades of the town's history had been vivisected and 24 placed on display before the world; the town would not soon forgive the apostate son who climbed the pinnacle of literary fame by flaying the 95 place of his birth. Wolfe ' s sister, Mabel, a resident of Ashevil le at the time of the book's publication, recalled the vehemence of the city's reaction : The only thing, I felt, that saved us Wolfes from being tarred and feathered was the fact that Tom had not spared us . He had lambasted the neighbors, but he had pictured his own family also, the community agreed, in no flattering light.96 A shudder ran through the mortified city as residents recognized them· selves and acquaintances vividly portrayed in the pages of the book. With only slight exaggeration, Thomas Wolfe described Asheville ' s feel-ings t-e\.rard him in his account of "Libyan Hill ts" reaction to the pub - lication of George Webber ' s first novel, "Home to Our Mountains": 'I have spent most of my time this past week, ' George wrote, 'reading and rereading all the letters that my erstwhile friends and neighbors have written me since the book came out. And now that the balloting is almost over and most of the vote is in, the result is startling and a little confusing. I have been variously compa r ed to Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Caesar's Brutus. I have been likened to the bird that fouls its own nest , to a viper that an inocent populace had long nurtured to its bosom, to a carrion crow preying upon the blood and bones of his relatives and friends, and to an unnatural ghoul to whom nothing is sacred, not even the tombs of the honored dead. I have been called a vulture, a skunk, a hog deliberately and lustfully wallowing in the mire, a defiler of pure womanhood , a rattlesnake, a jackass , an alleycat, and a baboon ••• there have been moments when I felt that maybe my accusers are right. • 97 In spite of his protestations of artistic integrity and wounded innocence, Wolfe had in fact anticipated a harsh reaction by Asheville . His notebooks clearly reveal that he had even drafted various defenses 98 against the expected onslaught before publication of the novel. Almost certainly, however, he was astonished and dismayed by the pitch and ex-tent of the uproar and by the agonizing slowness with which the hometown J;esentment against him waned: 25 I had thought that there might be a hundred people in that town who would read the book, but if there were a hundred outside of the negr o population, the blind , and the positively illiterate who did not read it, I do not know where they are. For months the town seethed with a fury of resentment which I had not believed possible.99 In the early and mid 1920s, during his first years away from Asheville, Wolfe had been wont to see himself as the sensitive and unappreciated artist in exile; he now found himself repudiated, disavowed, and held in contempt by the city upon which he had previously cast his scorn. He had hoped to prove himself to Asheville as a poet and genius, and the city ' s rejection of him was profound diappointment. 100 At length a more mature Wolfe came to regret having given so little quarter and not having considered the potential consequences of his book more carefully: I had written the book, more or less, directly from the experience of my own life, and, furthermore, I now think that I may have written it with a certain naked intensity of spirit which is likely to characterize the earliest work of a young writer.lOl . . • the young writer is often led through inexperience to a use of the materials of life which are, perhaps, somewhat too naked and direct for the purpose of a work of art. The thing a young writer is likely to do is to confuse the limits between actuality and reality. He tends unconsciously to describe an event in such a way because it actually happened that way, and from an artistic point of view, I can now see that this is wrong. It is not, for example, important that one remembers a beautiful woman of easy virtue as having come from the state of Kentucky in the year 1907. She could perfectly well have come from Idaho or Texas or Nova Scotia. The important thing really is only to express as well as possible the character and quality of the beautiful woman of easy virtue.l02 And so it is with some caution and much confidence one can turn to Look Homeward, Angel for a more or less accurate representation of the crucial role played by the Old Kentucky Home in Wolfe's youth and in the life of the family as a whole: 26 In the young autumn when th.e maples were still full and green •• • Eliza moved into Dixieland. There was a clangor, excitement, vast curiosity in the family about the purchase, but no clear conception of what had really happened. Gant and Eliza, although each felt dumbly that they had come to a decisive boundary in their lives, talked vaguely about their plans, spoke of Dixieland evasively as 'a good investment, ' said nothing clearly. In fact they felt their approaching separation instinctively: Eliza's life was moving by a half-blind but inevitable gravitation toward the centre of its desire - the exact meaning of her venture she would have been unable to define, but she had a deep conviction that the groping urge which had led her so blindly into death and misery at Saint Louis had now impelled her in the right direction. Her life was on its rails. And however vaguely, confusedly, and casually they approached this complete disruption of their life together , the rooting up of their clamerous home, when the hour of departures came, the103 elements resolved themselves immutably and without hesitation. Family life on Woodfin Street had been tur bulent and at times trau-matic, especially when W. 0. Wolfe embarked on his periodic and protracted drinking bouts and gave vent to his manifold frustrations. But, on the whole, life had been reasonably cohesive and pleasant, even though a permanent tension had already settled between W. 0. and Julia Wolfe. By the time of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, Frank ("Steve") had already taken up his drink-sodden and vagabond existence; he descended on Asheville now only at irregular intervals, drifting in and out of family life in the two houses. 104 Effie's ("Daisy's") marri-age was not quite, as Wolfe writes, "growing near" at the time of purchase. 105 She was not to marry Fred Gambrell until September 16, 1908. 106 During the interim she remained with Mabel and their father on Woodfin Street. 107 Leslie , the first child, h.ad by this time been dead for twenty years. Grover had died in St . Louis two years before the purchase . Tom was dragged umbilically to Spruce Street by his mother: 27 Eliza took Eugene with her. He was the last tie that bound her to all the weary life of breast and cradle; he still slept with her of nights; she was like some swimmer who ventures out into a dark and desperate sea, not wholly trusting to her strength and destiny, but with a slender cord bound to her which stretches still to land .l08 Ben and Fred ("Luke") were, as in Look Homeward, Angel, "left floating 109 in limbo," drifting uncertainly between the two houses. W. 0. Wolfe's celebrated views of the Old Kentucky Home and of boarding house life are only slightly exaggerated and caricatured in the novel as those of ''W. 0. Gant": Gant had already named it ' The Bam t; in the morning now, after his heavy breakfast at home, he would swing gauntl y toward town by way of Spring Street, composing en route the invective that he had formerly reserved to his sitting-room. He would stride through the wide ch.ill hall of Dix.ieland, busting in upon Eliza, and two or three of the negresses, busy preparing the morning 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 vented now. ''Woman, you have deserted my bed and board , you have made a laughing stock out of me before the world, and left your cflildren to perish. Fiend that you are, there is nothing that you would not do to torture, humiliate and degrade me. You have deserted me in my old age; you have left me to die alone. Ah, Lord! It was a bitter day for us all when your gloating eyes first fell upon this damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody Barn. There is no ignominy to which you will not stoop if you think it will put a nickel in your pocket. You have fallen so low not even your own brothers will come near you. 'Nor beast, nor man hath fallen so far.' "llO With less bombast, in a letter to Tom in 1917, the actual W. 0 . Wolfe ex-pressed his feelings toward the boarding house with simple and terse eloquence: " There are few at O.K.H. It would be much better if none were th ,111 ere. From time to time the exercised w. 0. Wolfe must have inveighed against the IllOtley array of character s which inevitably found their way to all but the most exclusive of Asheville boarding houses: "'Merciful God!' howled Gant, 'you've had 'em all-blind, lame, crazy, chippies and bastards. 112 They all come here.'" 28 Doubtless W. 0. Wolfe, like Gant, enjoyed the celebrity among the boarders which his commanding presence, dogmatic pronouncements, and colorful and hyperbolic personality won for him: Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would hold forth on the porch, his great voice carrying across the quiet neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his torrential eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his prejudiced but bold opinion upon current news.ll3 Less pleasant, indeed horrendous and humiliating, moments in the spot-light must have been passed by W. 0. Wolfe when, in the throes of his recurrent alcoholic seizures, he would cut a wide and abusive swath through the boarders and seriously disrupt Mrs. Wolfe's endeavors to 114 carry on a remunerative business. Ample evidence of other family members' disrelish of the boarding house might easily be gleaned from Look Homeward, Angel. Virtually every member of the family expresses himself on the subject at some point in the novel, and I am not aware that any member of the family has had his 29 view substantially misrepresented . In a letter to Elizabeth Nowell concern-ing Tom's infatuation with Clara Paul ("Laura James"), Mabel Wolfe Wheaton wrote: " •.. she fitted into the boarding house business which I had learned to hate."115 Later Mabel stated that: • I was always more interested in 92 Woodfin than I was in 116 the Spruce Street house, even throughout the time Mama owned it. Fred Wolfe recalled that, while the other Wolfe children were not so sensi- 117 tive on the issue as Tom, ''none of us liked to see Mama keep boarders.tt In comparing the Old Kentucky Home with the previous residence, Fred Wolfe remarked: Why this is a house. That was a home. That was the scene of our activity as children, the big Christmases, the big Fourth of July celebrations. That's where all the food was. That's where Mama reared us. That's where all the fruit and flowers were. Why, that was home ..•• 118 Of all the Wolfe children, Tom seems to have been most traumatically affected by the fractured family life and by the bleak, tumultuous , tawdry, and crowded life at the Old Kentucky Home: Eugene was ashamed of Dixieland . •• he felt thwarted, netted, trapped . He hated the indecency of his life, the loss of dignity and seclusion, the surrender to the tumultuous rabble of the four walls which shield us from them. He felt rather than understood, the waste, the confusion, the blind cruelty of their lives - his spirit was stretched out on the rack of despair and bafflement as there came to him more and more the conviction that their lives could not be more hopelessly distorted, wrenched, mutilated, and perverted away from all simple comfort, repose, happiness, if they had set themselves deliberately to tangle the skein, twist the pattern.ll9 There was no place sacred unto themselves, no place fixed for their own inhabitation, no proof against the invasion of the boarders.l20 30 In contrast to the Old Kentucky Home, Thomas Wolfe would always remem - 121 ber the Woodfin Street house as expansive, warm, and hospitable. Wolfe ' s principal biographers are agreed that the relative security and happiness of his early youth were swept away with the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home and the consequent disintegration of family life. 122 Like Eugene Gant, the young Thomas Wolfe returned to his fatherts house whenever possible: the powerful charm of Gant's house, of its tacked and added whimsey, its male smell, its girdling rich vines, its great gummed trees, its roaring internal seclusiveness, the blistered varnish, the hot calf- skin, the comfort and abundance, seduced him easily away from the great chill tomb of Dixieland • . As a rule, it was during peak periods of the summer, when bed space was at a premium, that Mrs. Wolfe would allow him to stay in his father's house. The neurotic tenacity with which Mrs . Wolfe clung to her youngest child was to permanently handicap him : "This abnormally prolonged infantile relationship affected Wolfe's entire character and life."124 The 123 members of the family on Woodfin Street were very much aware of his feelings: "[Tom] always wanted to live back home - we always left the doors un- 1 k d 11125 oc e . The separation of the family and the protracted and piti-able deterioration of W. 0. Wolfe's health, which began less than a decade afterward, all but destroyed the fabric of family life. For Thomas Wolfe the results were to prove a life- long emotional instability and im-maturity, a deep feeling of insecurity, a fear of enduring emotional 126 conmdtments, and a brooding introspectiveness. In the "Autobiographi-cal Outline" now at Harvard which Wolfe used as a guide in the writing of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe noted: "After Woodfin Street total lack of ritual in our life . •• 127 • the almost Over the years the initial feelings of vague alienation of the Old Kentucky Home took on a more definite shape. Like his father, Wolfe was temperamentally and instinctively averse to certain pervasive features of boarding house life. He detested the crass and demeaning commercialism of "drumming up trade " with prospective boarders. He recoiled from the enterpri se upon which his mother had embarked: In him as in Gant , there was a silent horror of sel ling for money the bread of one's table, the shelter of one ' s walls, to the guest, the stranger , the unknown friend from out of the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the broken , the knave, the harlot, and the fool.l28 Wolfe's lack of heart for drumming up trade for his mother ' s boarding house was to be an enduring feature of his personality and character. Mabel Wolfe Wheaton recalled that on several occasions Wolfe went to considerable trouble to prevent his classmates at the University of North Carolina from discovering that his mother kept a boar ding house. The embarrassing event described in Look Homeward , Angel as having occurred during the spring of his freshman year, seems to have had a f:trm basis in 129 fact. Mrs. Wolfe did in fact humiliate him during a visit to Chapel 31 • Hill. The mortified and perplexed Wolfe reported the incident to his sister at her home in Raleigh: M-M-M- Mabel, Mable, my God, she's ruining me over at Chapel Hill ••• I'll swear she's just r - r-ruining me with my friends. • • • My God Mabel, do y-y-y-you know what Mama d-d-did? Some of the fellows came to see her and when they told her, just being p-p-p-polite, that they would 1-1-like to come to Asheville this summer, she said, 'Well, if you boys will d-d-drum me up some business for the b- b-boarding house, I' 11 give you your b- b-board for nothing.' I tell yoy3~-M-M-Mabel, Mama's just ruining me over at Chapel Hill. As a boy Wolfe found his privacy constantly intruded upon and his spirit borne down by the petty annoyances of life in the Old Kentucky Home. For many years he harbored a deep resentment of the numberless, futile, demeaning, and random duties he was called upon to perform: Eliza grumbled at the boy's laziness . She complained that she could get him to do little or nothing for her. In fact, he was not lazy, but he hated all the dreariness of the boarding house routine. Her demands on him were not heavy, but they were frequent and unexpected. He was depressed at the uselessness of effort in Dixieland, at the total erasure of daily labor.l31 This lingering resentment surfaced at other times in his work, as in the "Three O'Clock" musings of young George Webber in The Web and the Rock: And if there is work to do at three o'clock ••• for God's sake give us something real to do •••• For God's sake don't destroy the heart and hope and life and will , the brave and dreaming soul of man, with common, dull, soul-sickening, mean transactions of these little things.l32 Another aspect of the boarding house operation in which Wolfe un-avoidably found himself involved was his mother's perennial problems with her hired help: Eliza got along badly with the negroes •.•• she had never been used to service, and she did not know how to accept or govern it graciously . She nagged and berated the sullen negro girls constantly, tortured by the thought that they were stealing her furnishings, and dawdling away the time for which she paid them. 133 32 Time and again Mrs. Wolfe would find herself deserted at a crucial point in the boarding house routine and would be forced to implore Mabel's assistance or send young Tom loathingly forth into the filth and degra-dation of "Niggertown" in search of a wretch willing or desperate enough to enter her dreaded employment. 134 Craving solitude, the young Thomas Wolfe would escape where he might within the crowded vastness of the Old Kentucky Rome, at his father's house on Woodfin Street, or in the playhouse. He employed what time and privacy he could snatch from the bustle of family life to accomplish the omnivorous reading which was to stand him in good stead for his life's work. Family members joked of discovering him in secluded and unexpected places "coiled up" and reading. Before moving on to the holdings of the public library, Wolfe eagerly devoured his fatherts libarary on Woodfin Street--a library remarkably rich and varied for a tradesman's library of that day or this . The pleasure and escape which the young Wolfe found in books was not sufficient, however, to counterbalance the hectic drearinessand shallow turbulence of everyday family existence. Years later, while engaged in the writing of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe spoke bitterly of the trauma and sorrow of his childhood in a letter to Mrs. J. M. Roberts, the woman whose teaching and guidance had rescued him from the ''bleak horror of Dixieland":135 You say that no one outside my family loves me more than Margaret Roberts. Let me rather say the exact truth: - that no one inside my family loves me as much, and only one other person, I think, in all the world loves me as much. My book if full of ugliness and terrible pain - and I think moments of a great and soaring beauty. • I was without a home - a vaga-bond since I was seven - with two roofs and no home . I moved inward on that house of death and tumult from room to little room, as the boarders came with their dollar a day, and their constant rocking on the porch. My overloaded heart was bursting with its packed weight of loneliness and terror; I was strangling, without speech, without articulation, in my own 33 secretions - groping like a blind sea-thing with no eyes and a thousand feelers toward light, toward life, toward beauty and order, out of that hell of chaos, greed and cheap ugliness - and then I found you, when else I should have died, you mother of my spirit who fed me with light. Do you think that I have forgotten? Do you think that I ever will?l36 The year preceding the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe felt it necessary to assure his mother that he had not irreconcilably turned his back on his family: I want to tell you something very plainly: I am not trying to avoid seeing any of you . • • . There has been no evasion. And, in spite of an ugly and rancorous feeling towards me which may exist in the family - a dislike which most of us feel for anything that is strange to us, remote from our experience, and living on a separate level of thought and feeling - I want to see you all very much - no matter howmuch pain and ugliness I may have to remember.l37 It would be a mistake to represent Wolfe's childhood, after the pur-chase of the Old Kentucky Home, as a protracted period of utter bleakness and unhappiness. There were occasional good times still for the boy and his family. At times the volatile children and parents blended harmoni.- ously together. There were scattered peri.ods of espri.t and genuine en-joyment of each other's company . Sometimes the mi.x of personalities in the Old Kentucky Home would result in an agreeable rapport between the Wolfes and their boarders. Wolfe forever retained fond memories of the family and boarders gathered around the piano in the parlor, as Mabel played and sang perennial favorites: On small solicitation, she sang for the boarders, thumping the cheap piano with her heavy accurate touch, and singing in her strong vibrant, somewhat hard soprano a repertoryof songs classical, sentimental, and comic. Eugene remembered the soft cool nights of summer, the assembled boarders , and ~I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, ,. which Gant demanded over and over; 'Love Me and the World is Minet: ~Till the ~ands of the Desert Grow Cold'; 'Dear Old Girl, the Rob-bin Sings Aoove You'; ~The End of a Perfect Day, t and t Alexander ~s Rag-Time Band,,. wlrlch Luke had practised in a tortured house for weeks~ and sung with thunderous success in the high schoo1Minstrels.l~8 34 He listened with awed attentiveness as his father indulged his flair for oratory and declamation or recited long passages of Gray, Tennyson, Scott, Shakespeare, and others from memory. For several years after the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, he accompanied his mother on long extended trips to Washington, Memphis, Hot Springs, Florida, and elsewhere.139 These trips whetted an appetite for travel which, in his adult life, was seldom sated, and afforded a welcome relief from the hectic unpleasantness of boarding house life. Notwithstanding the excess of sadness over joy in the future novel-ist's life at the Old Kentucky Rome, the boarding house played a crucial role in forcing his interaction with a colorful and unending parade of personalities and characters of every possible description. Each of the varying personages with which he came in contact might one day prove useful to the writer; some were also meaningful and important to a sensi-ti ve and insecure young man. According to Look Homeward , Angel, Wolfe struck up a close friendship at the Old Kentucky Home during the summer of 1914 with a spinster school teacher from New York. 140 The consolation and understanding of a regular boarder from Florida, represented by Wolfe as "Miss Irene Mallard," helped guide him through a difficult period of his youth and afforded him a companionship which he sorely needed on at least two occasions. 141 Doubtless there were many others over the years with whom Wolfe formed lasting and heart-felt associations. The Old Kentucky Rome brought him the poignant summer interlude with Clara Paul from Washington, North Carolina, represented as "Laura James" from "Little Richmond" in Look Homeward, Angel. Clara Paul was twenty-one years old. She had come to Asheville with her ten year old brother because of his ill health. Moreover, she was already promised to another, and, 35 after a brief stay at the Old Kentucky Home , she returned to Washington and was married. Two years later she was to die of influenza. Wolfe considerably fictionalized his account of the bitter-sweet romance in Look Homeward, Angel; in truth it seems to have been an unconsumated infatua- 142 tion between a teenage boy and a young woman whom he knew to be engaged. Less innocent, but not less instructive, were the brief encounters at the Old Kentucky Home with women of easier virtue. Several episodes of both active and passive seduction were recorded in Look Homeward , Angel~ such as the interludes with the incognito and mysterious prostitute '~ss Brown" and the middle-aged dentist's wife from South Carolina, with whom he carried on illicitly during the summer of 1920, until her consequent 143 ejection from the house by Mrs. Wolfe. The passing parade of boarders through the years provided the future novelist with an almost endless array of colorful and varied charcters, faces, and memories from which to draw: The Ohio woman who died of typhoid and whose distraught husband ''came quickly out into the hall and dropped 36 his hands"; the "thin-faced Jew" on the upstairs sleeping porch who "coughed through the interminable dark"; the lunatic "mul-tye-millionaire, Mr. Simon"; "Miss Billie Edwards . • • , the daring and masterful lion-tamer of Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows"; ''Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of an itinerant and usually absent drug salesman," who had an affair with Ben; ''Mr. Conway Richards, candy wheel concQssionaire with the Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows"; "Miss Lily Mangum, twenty-six, trained nurse"; "Mr . William H. Baskett, fifty-three, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi,'' cotton grower, banker, and sufferer from malaria; '~ss Annie Mitchell, nineteen, of Valdosta, Georgia"; '~ss Thelma Cheshire, twenty-one, of Florence, South Carolina"; ''Mrs . Rose Levin , twenty- eight, of Chicago, Illinois"; 11Miss Malone, the gaunt drug- eater with the loose gray lips"; " Fowler, a civil engineer • • • who came and departed quickly leaving a sodden stench of cornwhiskey in his wake"; ' 'Mary Thomas, a tall, jolly, young prostitute who came from Kentucky," who was a friend of "Helen's"; and the tall, mysterious , seductive, and adulterous Mrs. Selborne from South Carolina, who had a b rief affair with "Steve" her fir st sununer in the Old Kentucky Home and whose Negro cook ''W. 0. Gant" attempted unsuccessfully and disastrously to seduce in the playhouse on Woodfin Street. 144 Wolfe would remember the winters in the Old Kentucky Home as periods 37 of frigid bleakness: In the winter a few chil l boarders, those faces, those personalities which became mediocre through repetition , sat f or hours before the coals of the parl or hearth , rocking inter minably, dull of voice and gesture, as hideously bored with themselves and Dixieland, no doubt, as he [Eugene] with them. l45 The sununers, though crowded, hectic, and bereft of privacy, teemed with impressions at once sensual and sensuous, which were stored up in the capacious cache of Wolfe ' s memory: There came slow- bodied women from the hot rich South, darkhaired white bodied girls from New Orleans, com- haired blondes from Georgia, nigger- drawling desire from South Carolina. And there was malarial l assitude tinged faintly with yellow , from Mississippi but with white biting teeth. A red-faced South Carolinean, with n .icotined fingers, took him daily to baseball games; a lank yellow planter, malarial from Mississippi, climbed hills and wandered through the fragrant mountain valleys with him, of nights he heard the rich laughter of the women, tender and cruel, upon the d ark por ches , heard the florid throat tones of the men; saw the yielding stealthy harlotry of the Sout h - the dark secl usion of their midnight bodies, their morning innocence . l46 In spite of its tumult, its sordidness, its lack of privacy, its petty annoyance, and its emotional deprivation , boarding house life could not but contribute vivid color and emotive intensity to the work of an autobio-graphical novelist : • • • • the artist in him was bound to profit from the assortment of types that came to the Old Kentucky Home, just as his being born into a large, tempestuous family was a great human and psychological advantage, much as he suffered from their outbursts. l47 The Old Kentucky Home, of course, figures most prominently in Look Homeward, Angel as 11Dixieland. " It is the very hub around which the Gant saga revolves: The Old Kentucky home is so much like Dixieland that one who enters the house for the first time feels as if he were rereading the book. Wolfe has described minutely and accurately the rooms and furniture of the old boardinghouse.l48 The house plays an important part again in Of Time and the River, parti-cularly as the scene of his father's continued decline and death. In the two posthumous novels, The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, Wolfe, always sensitive to the accusation of being too autobio-graphical, attempted to reduce and alter the almost literal transcription 38 of his memories into prose. Rather clumsily and transparently, he changed the name of his protagonist from Eugene Gant to George Webber, and made other changes in a misguided attempt to diverge from authobiography. These attempts, however, were neither thorough-going, consistent, nor successful. In spite of increasing endeavors to create r~ther than record, in spite of changes in names and background, George Webber was almost as surely Thomas Wolfe as Eugene Gant had been, and "Libya Hill" nearly as faithful a rendering of Asheville as "Altamont" had been. Ostensibly the old boarding house disappeared from his later work. In The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again the house of George Webber's youth is depicted as a small one-story house on Locust S~reet, built by his Aunt Maw's father, Lafayette Yoy.ner. But, not unlike the Old Kentucky Home, • 39 the house is described as being of frame construction with a porch, gables, and bay windows . 149 In The Web and the Rock Wolfe overlapped Look Homeward, Angel chronol ogically by creating a new youth for his protagonist. George Webber is raised by his Aunt Maw, who has inherited responsibility for him following the desertion of his father , John Webber, and the death of his mother, Amelia- -Aunt Maw's younger sister. On first blush, Wolfe's charac-ters, situations, and settings seem to have been transformed; but he was, in fact, still mining the quarry of memories as Edward Aswell, the editor of his posthumous novels noted: Having abandoned Eugene Gant, he went back and re-created a new childhood for George Webber, working in the things he had forgotten when he wrote Look Homeward, Angel as well as a few of the things that had been cut from that book.l50 Floyd Watkins observed that, in The Web and the Rock, Wolfe added at least sixty-four characters from both memory and imagination which he had not used before". ' Wolfe inevitably returned to the fountainhead of memory and experience which had served him so well in Look Homewarq Angel. The Old Kentucky Home was of course the locale of various events which formed milestones in the life of the Wolfe family. On September 16, 1908 Effie was married, in a very grand style, to Fred Gambrell of Anderson, South Carolina, in the large dining room downstairs.152 rt was at the Old Kentucky Home that Frank met and seduced his future wife, the asthmatic Margaret Dietz, who had come to Asheville for her health from New Albany, Indiana. 153 On the evening of June 28, 1916 Mabel Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton were joined in conjugal union in a plush ceremony in the dining room, des-cribed in the newspaper account as "the west parlor of the commodious res1".d e nce. 11154 On the evening of October 19, 1918 occurred in the house the death of Ben, of all Wolfe's siblings the one to whom he felt closest. It was not only in Look Homeward, Angel that the death of his favorite brother proved a shattering and pivotal event in his life. Nearly a decade later, in a letter to his mother, Wolfe reflected the significance of his loss: Life dropped one of its big shells on us and blew us apart. Life at home practically ceased to be possible for me. when Ben died.lSS Ben had grown ill in the pitiably small and austere room upstairs with the small sleeping porch. Subsequently he was moved for warmth and comfort into the larger adjoining room on the northeast corner of the house: • the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian baywindow. It was next to the sleeping-porch where, but three weeks before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage curse at life. 156 The death scene which Thomas Wolfe would later describe--one of the great scenes in all of literature--would be drawn from the sorrow and bitterness 157 of a very personal loss. Like W. 0., Julia, and Tom, who would follow him at length, Ben "lay in the parlor bedded in his expensive coffin," 158 against the wall on the right as one enters from the hall. Four years later, on June 20, 1922, after many years of wretched and hopeless combat with a rampant cancer, W. 0. Wolfe was to die in the down- 40 stairs back bedroom of the house which had so often been the object of his eloquent invective. 159 The man who had once bestrode his small we~ld like a reeling colossus, had in his declining years become an emaciated and self-pitying old man. For more than a decade after the purchase of the Old Kentucky Home, W. 0. Wolfe had resolutely continued to make his home on Woodfin Street, despite the gnawing progress that cancer was maktng within him during his last years there. In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe indicated that his father's final move into the Old Kentucky Home. came 160 during the summer of 1917. This is corroborated by a letter of July 9, 161 1917 from W. 0. Wolfe to his son Ben. Mabel and Ralph Wheaton contin-ued to live in the Woodfin Street house, and were accepting roomers there in 1917 and 1918 . 162 As W. 0. Wolfe drew out his death on Spruce Street, his home on Woodfin Street and his shop on Pack Square were sold in quick succession. On April 24, 1920 the house was sold to one J . R. Durrett of 163 Marion County, Kentucky for $6,500 . Little more than a week later, on 41 164 May 3, 1920, the monument shop was sold to a Philip R. Moale for $25,000. The two structures around which W. 0 . Wolfe's life had revolved for nearly four decades were no longer so much as a part of it. 165 On May 22, 1920 Fred wrote a letter to Tom at Chapel Hi.ll, in which was reflected a mutual resentment and melancholy toward what had happened: I suppose that you are acquainted with the sale of the Woodfin property and the Wolfe Building. As to what our personal opinions are - regarding either - now is no time to cry over spilt milk. I had nothing to do with either deal, nor was my advice asked. I would suggest that nothing be said to worry Papa, he was not the power behind the throne in the sales . My main hope is - that he will be made comfortable for the remainder of his days (long or short?) on Spruce St. l66 During the late winter of 1919-1920 the furniture in the Woodfin Street 167 house was moved into the Old Kentucky Home . The house into which W. 0. Wolfe finally and reluctantly moved in 1917 was essentially as it is today. When Mrs. Wolfe bought the house in August of 1906 it was probably very much as it had been since the massive additions of 1885-1889. Thomas Wolfe best describes the overall appearance of the house at the time of his mother's purchase: It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middleclass street of small houses 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 deepbodied maples: there was a sloping depth of one hundred and ninety feet , a frontage of one hundred and twenty.l68 For ten years after Mrs. Wolfe•s purchase the house remained virtually unchanged, but in 1916 she undertook a substantial enlargement in order 169 to accomodate a larger share of the tourist trade: Meanwhile, business had been fairly good . Eliza's earning power for the first few years at Dixieland had been injured by her illnesses . Now, however, she had recovered, and had paid off the last installment on the house. It was entirely hers. The property at this time was worth perhaps $12,000. In addition she had borrowed $3,500 on a twenty year $5,000 life insurance policy that had only two years more to run, and had made extensive alterations: she had added a large sleeping porch upstairs, tacked on two rooms, a bath, and a hallway on one side, and two baths, and a watercloset, on the other . Downstairs she had widened the veranda, put in a large sun- parlor under the sleeping porch, knocked out the archway in the dining room, which she prepared to use as a big bedroom in the slack season, scooped out a small pantry in which the family was to eat, and added a tiny room beside the kitchen for her own occupancy. The construction was a.fter her own plans, and of the cheapest material: it never lost the smell of raw wood, cheap varnish, and flimsy rough plastering, but she had added eight or ten rooms at a cost of only $3 , 000.170 The venerable hot - air furnace wlrlch had groaned and faltered under the burden of heating the house before the additions, had no prayer of doing so now . The rooms which had been added onto the back of the house upstairs and the sleeping porch at the head of the stairs were heated by small wood and coal stoves which opened into flues . In the early 1920s the old furnace gave up the ghost entirely, and stoves and heaters were installed in other rooms of the house. 171 Since 1916 the appearance of the house has changed little if at all, except for an occasional change in color . Wolfe's description of the house as painted a "dirty yellow'' was probably accurate for the entire period depicted in Look Homeward, .Angel. .An undated hand-colored postcard shows the house (being operated as the Colonial) as it appeared prior to 1916. 42 in April of 1921 W. 0. Wolfe wrote his son at Harvard of a recent change in the appearance of the house: '~ou could not recognize the O.K.H. which is newley [sic] painted cream body and chocklate [sic] trim."172 The house has been white since at least the early 1950s and may have been so since the late 1930s or early 1940s. 43 I have been unable to discover exactly how the house was furnished at the time of Mrs. Wolfe's purchase. It seems probable that some of the Reverend Myer's furnishings remained in the house when ownership changed. The older of the two pianos and the formidable wood range in the kitchen are known to have been in the house prior to 1906. 173 Because Mrs. Wolfe inherited nineteen boarders with the purchase of the house, it is likely that much or all of the furniture in their rooms would have been left undisturbed . Doubtless some furniture was brought up from Woodfin Street in 1906 and from time to time thereafter. More would have come with W. 0. Wolfe during his move in 1917. But until near the sale of the Woodfin Street house, there was a need to leave adequate furnishings in the original house to maintain a separate household. Finally, at the time of the sale of the Woodfin Street house, the balance of its furnishings were moved into the Old 174 Kentucky Home. For as long as Mrs. Wolfe operated the Old Kentucky Home as a board~g house, the hub of activity was in the dining room. During the period of Wolfe's youth depicted in Look Homeward, Angel there were four large tables in the dining room, each with a capacity for eight to ten people. Near the door stood the family table where boarders "of long standing" were some-times invited to sit. After the additions in 1916 the family members seemed to have been shunted off into the small pantry near the dining room. Meals were served in four separate sets of dishes, so that each 44 of the tables was sufficient unto itsel£ . 175 During the salad days of the boarding house operation, Mrs. Wolfe received a weekly remuneration from her guests of seven or eight dollars. In addition to cooking for her regular boarders, Mrs. Wolfe also served meals to outside guests or drop- ins, who purchased their meals at prices ranging from 25¢ for breakfast to SO¢ for 176 Sunday dinner. In the early period much of the produce needed for the Old Kentucky Home kitchen was supplied by the vegetable garden and fruit trees at Woodfin Street. Mrs. Wolfe continued to raise smaller quantities of vegetables and white grapes at the Old Kentucky Home until her last days . 177 Mabel Wolfe Wheaton's recollection was that 'we had soup 365 days of the year" and that her mother charged eight to ten dollars a week for room and board. 178 By the very early 1920s or before, when Mrs. Wolfe gave up the boarding house business and began to keep roomers only, the dining room was converted into a large bedroom. Look Homeward, Angel dates 179 the closing of the dining room as early as the death of Ben in 1918. In the declining years of the Old Kentucky Home, the dining room fell into desuetude and served only as storage space. 180 The Old Kentucky Home was operated under several proprietors during the period of Wolfe ' s youth. Mrs . Wolfe very often took extended trips during the slack winter months and occasionally at other times of the year. During these periods of her absence the Old Kentucky Home was leased out to others and was occasional ly operated under another name. According to Mabel Wolfe Wheaton the house was being operated as the Colonial in 1910 by Mrs. 0 . L. Neville . 181 If this is true, the colored post card earlier referred to can be dated accordingly. But the situation of 1910 is ren-dered problematical by the City Directory of that year, which at once, 45 places Olive Neville and the Colonial at 29 Flint Street, states that the Old Kentucky Home is being operated as a boarding house at 48 Spruce Street, that the house at 48 Spruce Street is vacant, and that Mrs. Julia Wolfe is idin 92 T.T dfin S i h the rest of the f.,.,...;ly ·. 182 res g at noo treet w t ~ In 1916 the house was operated by M. M. and Catherine D. Castillo as the Richmond. 183 Probably there we re other proprietors and other names under which the house was operated during Mrs. Wolfe's absence. Upon her return, however, Mrs. Wolfe seems to have repossessed her boarding house with a vengeance from her hapless tenants : In the winter now, she rented Dixieland for a few months, sometimes for a year, although she really had no intention of allowing the place to slip through her fingers during the profitable summer season: usually she let the place go, more or less deliberately, to some unscrupulous adventuress of lodging houses, good for a month's or two months• rent, but incapable of the sustained effort that would support it for a longer time. On her return from her journey, with rents in arrears, or with some other violation of the contract as an entering wedge, Eliza would surge triumphantly into battle, making a forced entrance with police, plain-clothes men, warrants, summonses, writs, injunctions, and all the artillery of legal warfare, possessing herself forcibly and with vindictive pleasure, of her property.l84 Mrs . Wolfe followed a gruelling and hectic regimen in operating the Old Kentucky Home, especially before closing the dining room. Wolfe would later describe her compulsive toil as beginning before seven in the morning and extending often until two o'clock the following morning. 185 In the early years Mrs. Wolfe passed her fleeting hours of sleep in the front bedroom downstairs with the bay window. Later, following the additions of 1916, she moved into the small bedroom at the rear of the house just off the k •t h 186 ~ c en. Before 1920 and Wolfe's departure for Harvard, Mrs. Wolfe had delegated much of the everyday operations of the house to a '~ss Newton, a wrenny and neurotic old maid with asthma ••• [who] had gradually become Eliza's unofficial assistant in the management of the house,'' while she devoted more and more of her time and energies to her proliferating real estate speculations. 187 During the years of Wolfe's youth, North Spruce Street was a neighbor-hood of private residences and several boarding houses. The Dixie, the Colonial, the Elton, the Belvidere, and the ~elmont, their various pro-prietors, and some of their boarders would have been among his recollec-tions of the Spruce Street neighborhood (see Appendix G). An examination of the city directories indicates that North Spruce Street was emerging as a boarding house street as early as the 1890s. By the time of which Wolfe wrote in Look Homeward, Angel, this development had made considerable head-way. Across the street from the Old Kentucky Home and to the left, at 57 North Spruce, stood the Belmont (later the Belvidere), which Wolfe refers to as "The Brunswick," According to Look Homeward, Angel, W. 0. Wolfe had participated in the construction of this house, and later had refused his wife's entreaties to collaborate 188 in its purchase. Wolfe also wrote of "The Brunswick" that one of his few childhood friends on Spruce Street was 46 the son of its proprietor in 1910 (see Appendix G), and that its ravenous guests were summoned to table by means of a Japanese gong. 189 Other boarding houses in the near vicinity stood along Woodfin Street, North Main, and College Streets, with names like Wyckoff Hall, the Lisbon, and the Ozark. Wolfe grew up surrounded by these and other boarding houses and doubtless was acquainted with many of the women who toiled within them. 190 During the years before Wolfe's departure for the University of North Carolina, Spruce Street was experiencing a rapid turnover in residents. A comparison of the City Directories for 1900, ·1906; 1910, and 1916 reveals that a very low proportion of those dwelling on the street were permanently settled. Of twenty individual residents listed in 1900, only six remained 47 in 1906. Of seventeen residents listed in 1906, only seven r emained in 1910. And of twenty-one residents in 1910 , only six remained in 1916 , the year of 191 Wolfe's departure for Chapel Hill. These directories also reveal the beginnings of an insidious encroachment by the commercial district onto the street in the wake of Asheville's accelerated growth, and encroachment which would at length comp l etely alter and disfigure the neighborhood. The changes which were occurr ing in the surroundings of the Old Kentucky Home during Wolfe ' s late pre-college years reflected changes which were taking place in the city as a whole. Wolfe, himself, was deeply disturbed by the heedlessly rapid growth and elemental transformations which were taking place in Ashevil le during the first three decades of this century. In the year of Wo l fe's birth Asheville had been a small town of 14,694 residents. By 1910 a slow growth had increased the population only to 18 , 762. But the city's growth had then begun to snowball; by 1 920 the population had reached 28,504,and by 1930 had soared to 50,193. In the wake of local and nationwide financial disasters, the momentum was then l ost; during the decade of the 1930s the population increased only to 51,310. 192 The foundations of economic disaster in Asheville were alr eady well laid before the Great Depression struck . Beginning about 1923 Wolfe began to evince a marked repugnancy toward the shallow commer cial ism and grasping materialism which was transforming Asheville almost beyond recognition. By 1926, Buncombe County , in the thrilling throes of a land boom, led the state in the assessed value of its real est ate. The f ollowing year the crash came. Asheville was financially devastated, and many of its leading cit i - 193 zens completely wiped out. Subsequent disasters befell the already stricken city in 1929 and 1930 in the form of widespread bank failures and • the consequent bankrupt cy and ignom.inious col lapse of local government. Four years after the publication of Look Homewa r d, Angel, in a letter to his mother, Wolfe summed up his feelings toward what had happened in Asheville: I dislike the whole booster ~boom-town-country club whoop~it-up kind of spirit because the whole thing is a lie and there is not a single decent and honest human value in it and everybody knows it .. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • II; • • • • • • I agree with you that it seems hard to see any immediate hope for Asheville. They invested their whole lives in a toy balloon and when the balloon burst, there was nothing left, not even the wind they pumped into it.l94 To its most famous son, the fortunes of Asheville were never matters of indifference. Throughout his career the city loomed prominently in his 195 thoughts and had continuing impact on his work. Fo l lowing two novels almost entirely concerned with the larger world into which he had escaped 48 as a young man, it is significant that, with his last and uncompleted novel, The Hills Beyond, Wolfe was returning, for subject matter, to the mountains and people from which he had sprung. By the time of Wolfe ' s departure for Harvard, the Old Kentucky Home had seen its best days. Like the neighborhood of which it was a part, it bad entered upon a protracted decline. After her initial trip to southern Florida in January of 1923, Mrs. Wolfe seems to have devoted very little time to the dwindling numbers of winter guests , Increasingly she was titil-lated by the glo~ing potentials of real estate speculation in Miami and Miami Beach, and thereafter repaired southward almost annually, drawn by the combined inducements of warmer weather and the chance of fabulous wealth. For many years she contemplated the construction of a modern apartment building in Miami, both as a sound investment and as a permanent resi.dence. 19b Needless to say this recurring scheme never materialized, and the Old Ken- • tucky Home suffered a decline in business due to patterns of -Asheville's development, local and national economic conditions, and the side effects of two world wars. During the erstwhile peak of the tourist season, in early July of 1917, W. 0. Wolfe wrote Ben that there were only eight boarders at the Old Kentucky Home, due primarily to World War 1. 197 Two weeks later the number of guests had risen to eighteen or twenty, but W. 0. Wolfe continued to forecast a bleak tourist season. 198 In June of 1931 Fred wrote Tom that there were only three or four in the house, and that their mother "so far has had scarecly [sic] any one this year."199 Just before Christmas of the same year, Mrs. Wolfe, in a letter to Tom, complained that well-to-do winter travelers would no longer suffer the infamous chill of the Old Kentucky Home, and that they were seeking more modern accomodations with steam heat. Consequently she was being left with an increasingly indigent and shiftless clientele, many of whom were out of work and able to pay little or nothing for their rooms. 200 In March of 1932 Mrs. Wolfe reported that there were no roomers in the house, that the place needed painting, 201 that the roof was leaking, and that some of the plumbing had burst. Her letter of two months later must have roused unpleasant memories of "drum-ming up trade" within her son's breast, as it exhorted him to promote mountain trips among his New York friends and promised an ample supply of Chamber of Commerce brochures to aid him in his endeavors. 202 By May of 1933 Mrs. Wolfe's business had grown so bad that she was accepting for 50¢ a night undesirable roomers whom in better days she would 203 have turned away. During the mid 1930s the Old Kentucky Home was no 49 longer bringing in sufficient money to cover the cost of heat and utilities, and Fred was having to contribute what he could to the upkeep of the house. 204 • Mrs. Wolfe recognized that during the financial boom of the early and mid 1920s Asheville bad begun to change in such a way as to place Spruce Street outside the normal lines of travel, and that the relentless transition of Spruce Street fromaresidential to a commercial area had rendered the surroundings less and less inviting to potential guests. By the winter of 1938 Mrs. Wolfe had begun to sleep on a bed in the parlor in an effort to keep warm in the delapidated and ill-maintained structure: I feel the cold but I dress like an Eskimo, to keep from suffering, but can ' t get any work done for I have to stay close to the fire here in the living room, even sleep here. This house was built for summer boarding house, now old, obsolete-could not be made comfortable besides [it] would cost more than to build a modern house.205 During the year just prior to his death, Wolfe described the Old Kentucky Home and his mother's attachment to it in a letter to Mrs. J. M. Roberts, who had inquired whether two young visitors to Asheville might not stay there : As for Mama~s house, there is certainly room there, but it is frankly in a delapidated state--an old house in a state of disrepair, which has long since passed its palmy days. Of course it is Mama ' s house and she loves it and sees it with a different eye, but these are the facts and I don't know whether it would be advisable for the young people to stay there or not.206 A constant and o:(ttimes solitary roomer at the Old Kentucky Home from 1922 to 1933 was the shadowy Theodore ("Ted") Salmer, a mild , softspoken, shabby, pitiable, and alcoholic man, who for eleven years helped look after things in the house, provided companionship for Mrs. Wolfe, and finally died at her feet of a massive hemorrhage one Sunday morning in 207 November of 1933. Family letters from the 1920s and earl y 1930s sometimes mention that "Old Salmer" has been left in charge of the house 50 51 during Mrs. Wolfe ' s absence or that he is currently the only roomer in the house. Fred Wolfe recal ls him fondly, and remembers that Mrs. Wolfe allowed Salmer to stay in the house for little or no payment. 208 Salmer appears fleetingly as "Gilmer" in Wolfe's story "The Return of the Prodi- 1 11ga . 209 Indeed, Wolfe's notebook for early 1934 reveals that he was contemplating, but never completed, an entire short story built around a 210 roomer at the Old Kentucky Home whom he planned to call "Gilmer." Upon hearing of Salmer's death, Wolfe wrote his mother in commiseration: A postcard from Mabel this morning informed me that Mr. Salmer died Sunday and that you were with him when he died . I know what a sad thing this must be for you and that you have lost a good friend . All of us I know feel sad about it because we all liked him. 211 Between 1917 and 1925 North Market Street was cut through behind the Old Kentucky Home, between North Main and North Spruce Streets, as the in-cursions of the downtown commercial district into the neighborhood con-tinued apace. As early as 1922 city planners envisioned drastic changes in the formerly residential section of which the Old Kentucky Home was a part. A comprehensive proposal of that year for Asheville ' s future devel-opment called for the establishment of a civic center to the north of Col-lege Street, between Spruce and Oak Streets, which was to contain a post office, a library, a federal building, and a community center. The proposed plan of development pointed out that the Spruce Street area was in close proximity to Pack Square, that it was outside the normal flows of traffic, that it was not yet highly developed, that it should be inexpensive to pro- cure, and that it was a suitable location for a large downtown hotel. 212 By 1930 the once residential North Spruce Street boasted a tire company, two automotive electrical shops, one new car dealer, two used car lots, two garages, and two funeral homes . To the rear and north of the Old Kentucky • Home, at the corner of North Market and Woodfin Streets, the AshevilleBiltmore Hotel had risen. 213 Of special significance in the subsequent history of the Old Kentucky Home was to be the erection of Harry's Motor Inn directly to its rear. On December 21, 1926 Harry D. Blomberg signed an agreement with Mrs. Wolfe to lease the Old Kentucky Home property be-tween the back of the house and North Market Street and to build upon it 214 a large one-story garage, subject to her approval of the plans . Blom-berg would later play a crucial role with regard to the house, and the unsightly garage which he constructed still stands pressed snugly against its backside. The trend of the neighborhood downward, once begun, was never reversed. Scattered brief descriptions of the house after the neighborhood's decline can be gleaned from several sources. In 1935 G. E. Dean, writing for The State, rendered the following description: It is the same rambling, unplanned, added-to, gabular affair with 18 or 20 rooms and painted on the outside a dirty yellow as described in the novel Look Homeward, Angel . But about it now there is something of a semblance of a dusty museum which never fails to fascinate readers who delight in seeing the book come to life.215 Dean noted the presence of numerous photographs in the parlor and the piano on the sun porch, over which were hung two of Thomas Wolfe's diplomas. 216 Another description dating from 1935 described the neighborhood as "shabby and non-descript." The house was said to have a "Tourists" sign on the front lawn, a faded "Old Kentucky Rome" sign over the front door, and to have "recently been painted a somewhat startling shade of yellow. " The parlor was reported to have a red carpet and lace curtains . A marble-top table held copies of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, and the walls were "decorated with innumerable photographs, and Tom's college 52 53 217 diplomas. " In August of 1940 a visitor noted that Mrs . Wolfe was taking roomers at $1.00 a day. The front yard was said to be grassless, flowerless~ and broom- swept . The house badly wanted paint and its overall appearance was one of "a cheap boarding house ." In the parlor were easy chairs and a davenport. An upright piano stood diagonally across one corner of the room and atop the piano was a photograph of Tom . Two enlarged tintypes of the twins, Grover and Ben , adorned one wall of the parlor. On the sunporch broken window panes had been replaced with newspapers . The central light fixture of the sun parlor was socketed for six bulbs but contained only two. The second of the two upright pianos stood diagonally across one corner of the sun parlor. In addition, the sun parlor contained a mission oak daven-port, a windowseat with cushions, and a table with potted plants. The over-all impression of the house was one of loneliness and bleakness , yet this writer was told by a Florida couple currently staying there that Mrs. Wolfe 218 "runs the cleanest boarding house in Asheville." Through the years Mrs. Wolfe clung to the old boarding house, which was drawing increasing numbers of visitors, if not roomers, as her son ' s novels gained increasing audiences. Ironically, the growth of public interest in Mrs. Wolfe and the Old Kentucky Home developed against a background of finan-ci al and legal reverses of a most serious aspect--reverses which would finally result in bankruptcy and loss of the house at public auction. The financial and legal odyssey which resulted at length in Mrs. Wolfe ' s loss of the Old Kentucky Home would be tedious to relate in every detail. Its even-tual loss was preceded and surrounded by labyrinthine legal and fina ncial entanglements which are extremely difficult to fully unravel and which as yet have received little or no attention, It is hoped that the following account of this tmportant episode in the history of the house ~1 steer a middle course between excessive brevity and unendurable tedium. 219 On October 17, 1922, some four months after the death of W. 0. Wolfe, Fred Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton were duly qualified as executors of his will and were entered upon the administration of his estate. They were empowered by provisions of the will to disperse $5,000 each to Effie , Frank, Mabel, Fred, and Tom, after which the balance of the estate was to devolve upon Mrs. Wolfe. Soon after the issuance of their letters testamentary, however, Fred Wolfe and Ralph Wheaton became inactive as executors, having only partially satisfied the provisions of the will. After remaining inactive until 1937, their letters were re-voked and the further administration of the W. 0. Wolfe estate was placed in the hands of S. J. Pegram by order of the clerk of Buncombe Superior Court. Soon after the death of W. 0. Wolfe, however, in the absence of 54 an on- going administration of the estate by its executors, Mrs. Wolfe had, in practice, taken control over her husband's estate , buying, sell ing, and investing freely, upon the mistaken assumption of her legal right to do so under the provisions of the will. There had followed numerous financial and property transactions on the part of Mrs . Wolfe, principally in Asheville and Miami, as she speculated wildly on the crest of real estate booms in both areas. By the summer of 1927 Mrs. Wolfe had overextended herself and felt that her financial affairs had grown too sizable and complex for her continued personal management. Moreover, the real estate bubbles in both Asheville and Miami had burst, and she had encumbered many of her holdings to such an extent that they were in imminent danger of foreclosure for debt. On June 10, 1927 Mrs. Wolfe entered into an irrevocable ''Living Trust" agreement with Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, whereby she vir tually sur- 55 220 rendered all personal control of her financial affairs. Thenceforward she exercised the power neither to loose nor bind those monies and proper-ties attached to the corpus of the trust estate by the original and supple-mental agreements . On June 14, 1927 the Old Kentucky Home was joined to the corpus of the agreement, thereby relinquishing control of the house which, even then, her son was in the process of immortalizing as he wrote 221 Look Homeward, Angel. There followed a complex and confusing series of deeds in trust, promissory notes, and loans which further complicated the legal ties which bound the Old Kentucky Home to Mrs. Wolfe's agreements with Wachovia. By January of 1937 the old boarding house (referred to in the various financial and legal documents as the "First lot") was heavily encumbered by four substantialmortgages and a lien against the house for 222 unpaid taxes. At length Mrs . Wolfe ' s failure to maintain the payment of her crushing indebtedness and her non-payment of city and county taxes over a number of years, for which Wachovia assumed responsibility as trustee, resulted in the issuance of a summons by Wachovia on January 4, 1937 against Mrs. Wolfe, the Wolfe children and their spouses, various city and county officials, private individuals with separate liens against Wolfe properties, Wachovia 223 Bank and Trust Company, Trustee, and, subsequently, against S. J. Pegram as administrator of the W. 0. Wolfe estate. From June 10, 1927 to March 1, 1937 the trust estate had realized f rom rents, notes, real estate sales, and miscellaneous sources $115,707 . 42 in income . Over the same period, however, the total disbursements necessary for the maintenance of the estate had totaled $138,169.11, so that the estate was deeply in debt to Wachovia as trustee. In addition, the estate was encumbered by unpaid liab:tli.ti.es of $126,663 . 66 composed of debts in- curred, interest due, and unpaid commissions. At the time the suit was initiated, Wachovia estimated the rental value of the Old Kentucky Rome, "a very old residence," to be no more than $50.00 a month. In early 1938 the court appointed referee was to gauge the value of the house and lot at $26,100. The Old Kentucky Home and seven other of Mrs. Wolfe's properties, six of which were unimproved, were the sole assets remaining to the estate, and Wachovia had brought the action after concluding that the estate's excess of liabilities over assets could only be expected to worsen. The Wolfes argued, in their answer to Wachovia's complaint and in several subsequent countersuits, that Wachovia had grossly underestimated the value of the estate's remaining assets and its original value, that Wachovia and Mrs. Wolfe had violated the provisions of W. 0. Wolfe's will, and had attacked the interests of his heirs by entering into the trust agreement in the first place, that Mrs. Wolfe had been unduly hastened and cajoled into making the agreement without being sufficiently informed of its consequences, and that the estate had been managed negligently and unskillfully, while wise advice and lucrative opportunities had gone begging. As a culmination of their contercharges, the Wolfes alleged that they were entitled to $150,000 in compensatory damages and $50,000 in punitive damages from Wachovia for its "gross and willful negligence'' and mismanagement. Following a series of legal maneuvers on both sides, the cause was referred to George A. Shuford, Referee, by order of Buncombe Superior Court Judge A. Hall Johnston on December 16, 1937 . Shuford began to hear evidence of January 31, 1938 and finally submitted his report on December 56 57 21 of that year. In his report Shuford concluded that the trust agreement had become "impossible of fulfillment" and that the estate was " totally insolvent. " He further found that the estate of W. 0. Wolfe had no viable interest in the litigat ion, that the Wolfe children and their spouses were not legitimate parties therein, and that Wachovia was entitled to sell the remaining assets of the estate for recovery of Mrs . Wolfe's defaulted debts. Shuford's original findings of fact and conclusions of law were appealled by the Wolfes, and the cause was referred to him a second t±me on January 19 , 1939 by Buncombe Superior Court Judge J. Will Pless, Jr . Referee Shuford ' s final report of January 28, 1939 was amended only slightly , in part to adjust its findings and concl usions to the Wolfe ' s counterclaims. As in his original report, Shuford found against the Wolfes on virtually every item of Wachovia ' s complaint. Furthermore, he exonerated the corporation from any all egat ions of negligence or wrongdoing and declared the Wolfe's counterclaim to have no merit in law. The Wolfes ' counterclaim was subsequently dismissed by Judge Pless on June 16, 1939. On August 17, 1939 Judge J. A. Rousseau of Buncombe Superior Court , following a jury verdict against the Wolfes, handed down a decision in favor of Wachovia which in effect accepted and confirmed Referee Shuford's reports. In his Judgement and Decree Judge Rousseau ordered Mrs. Wolfe to pay Wachovia the enormous sums due them by August 31. Failing that, Reed Kitchen was appointed commissioner with the authority to sell separately her encumbe r ed properties at the door of courthouse on behalf of the plaintiff creditor, Wachovia, which was to be permitted to participate in the bidding . In the event , Mrs. Wolfe proved unable to repay her onerous debts . There were no means at hand to save the Old Kentucky Home from the auctioneer~s gavel, and, on Monday, October 2, 1939, at • high noon, the old boarding house was sold to Wachovia Bank and Trust 224 Company for a total price of $32,876.65. The grueling and protracted legal battle and Mrs. Wolfe's eventual loss of the house involved the children in varying degrees. Almost cer-tainly there was some festering resentment against their mother for having squandered a portion of the inheritance due them from their father's estate. On the whole, however, the children were bound together in sym-pathy for their mother and in resentment of Wachovia and the "Living Trust." A number of letters between family members from the late 1930s convey this impression . As on most occasions, Fred was most unequivocal in his analysis of the situation, as evinced in his explanation of the "Living Trust" agreement to Tom: It is a very insidious and insecure and one-sided Hellish instrument which gave them full power to act and destroy and dissipate the entire estate. • All hers and our interests due to their mishandling and squandering of the estate have been destroyed. Their suit also pleads for recovery of Old Kentucky Home property street to street including Harry' s Motor Inn . Mama is holding due to occupancy of the premises, and can be evicted by court action based on the outcome of the suit. I started the thing since they were suing us and mama and will see it through, come what may, as we either fight back or else let them kick mamma out. 225 As early as February 15, 1937 Wolfe was expressing concern over the bank suit in a letter to his mother: Fred spoke to me in his letter of trouble which Wachovia Bank is now making for you concerning the house on Spruce Street. • • • Fred didn't tell me much about the Wachovia trouble, but I wish when you get time, some of you would write and tell me about it.226 By April 28, 1937, largely as a result of the law suit, he was beginning to weigh whether he should end his self-banishment from Asheville: I want to come down to see you and talk to you and find out what this Wachovia Bank business is all about . If there is anyway I can help, I want to do so. 58 It will be a very strange experience , I think, coming back to Asheville after all these years.227 59 In any event, Wolfe's concern and curiosity over the bank suit and the possible loss of the Old Kentucky Home proved important factors in his decision to return to Asheville in May of 1937~ after nearly eight 228 years of voluntary exile. On May 3, 1937 Wolfe stole silently into town and made his way to 48 Spruce Street. At the time of his arrival, his mother's legally imperiled boarding house boasted but a single 229 roomer, a school teacher . The prodigal novelist's return to Asheville was both successful and reassuring. So pleased and relieved was Wolfe by his hometown's reception in May that he resolved to spend the summer there following a brief return to New York. Raving arranged to rent a secluded cabin at Oteen from c artoonist, Max Whitson, Wolfe returned to Asheville from New York in 1 J 1 230 ear y u y. The summer proved a disastrous mistake . Wolfe had hoped to see his family and a few old friends, to get some writing done, to enjoy the peaceful privacy of the cabin, and to commune once again with the mountain surroundings he had loved since childhood. Instead the summer became a series of unending disturbances, uninvited visitors, phone calls, questions, autographs, notoriety, and family discord. At the Old Kentucky Home Tom and Frank clashed almost as soon as they met . Wolfe found the atmosphere of his mother's home so strained that he spent more time at Mabel's residence than on Spruce Street, thus exacerbating the anci~nt jealousy between sister and mother. The reunion of the volatile family members once again under the same roof produced a chain of small ex- 231 plosions which Wolfe found unpleasant and vexing in the utmost degree. Weary of the constant disturbances at the Oteen cabin , Wolfe moved secretly into the Battery Park Hotel in late August, in hopes of securing rest and so1 1. .tud e. 232 A few days prior to his final departure from Asheville, Wolfe moved into his mother's house on Spruce Street. 233 The last night Wolfe ever spent in the Old Kentucky Home must have been the night of September 4, 1937. He left for New York, never to see Asheville again, on the following day. 234 The summer in Asheville had been anything but pleasant. While Wolfe had been relieved to find the old animosities over Look Homeward, Angel subsided, the visit had proven extremely taxing physically, psychologi-cally, and emotionally. Old family wounds had been reopened, especially between himself and Frank, and Wolfe had resolved not to return to Ashe-ville . The bitter feelings he harbored on the subject of his homecoming were reflected in a letter to Fred: About the summer I spent at home, my first return in seven years or more, the less said the better. I'd like to forget about it if I could. I went home a very tired man, not only with all this trouble of Scribner's gnawing, but the pressure and accumulation of everything that has happened in the past two years . And when I left home I was as near to a breakdown as I have ever been. • • . It's too bad things had to turn out the way they did this summer: I had hoped that things would have changed: I had been away so long that I thought maybe they would be different. But I found out they were just the same, only worse: So I guess that's the end of me in Asheville. I'm sorry that you felt that I did not go around to the house enough this summer. I went all I could, but the situation there was such that I could not have gone more often than I did. • • • I have something in me that some people value, that has given some people happiness and pleasure, and that people think is worth saving. I think so too, and that is why I'm going to try to save it . I'm willing to do anything I can to help any one of my own kin in any way I can, but I'm not willing to waste my life and talent in an atmosphere of ruin and defeat, among people who can't be helped and who have been so defeated that they hate everything in life that has not been, and want to drag it down. I'm sorry to have to talk this way, but I have been driven to it. I've felt pretty sick and sore at heart when [sic, since] I left home, as it 235 has been so sad and so different from what I had hoped it would be. 60 61 Tragically, Wolfe would not long be able to save that "something" in him which had "given some people happiness and pleasure. " In little more than a year after his departure from Asheville, his life would be prematurely extinguished by miliary tuberculosis of the brain, in the thirty-seventh year of his age. Wolfe grew gravely ill in the mid summer of 1938, following his "Western Journey"--an extensive and grueling two-week sweep through the national parks of the western United States by automobile from June 21 to July 1. As he lay sick in Seattle, Washington, he was joined first by Fred and then by Mabel, |
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