Smart Bets: Thomas Wolfe Memorial reopens

Thomas Wolfe fans will be happy to know that they can go home again. The 19th-century Victorian house at 52 N. Market St. where the author spent his childhood and adolescence is again welcoming visitors following repairs after a 120-year-old silver maple tree fell against and damaged the historic home during Tropical Storm Helene. The pale-yellow clapboard home was constructed in 1883 by Asheville banker Erwin Sluder; originally seven rooms with a front and rear porch, additions doubled its size by the early 1890s. The Wolfe family moved into the home in 1906, when Thomas Clayton Wolfe, the youngest of eight children, was 6 years old. In 1911, his mother, Julia Wolfe, added 11 more rooms, indoor plumbing and operated it as a boardinghouse. Named “Old Kentucky Home” by a previous owner, Wolfe renamed it “Dixieland” in his autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel, a book so controversial it was banned from Asheville’s public library for over five years. In 1949, following the death of his mother, the house was opened to the public as a museum, preserved almost intact with the original furnishings arranged in much the same way as when the writer lived there. The museum is open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. avl.mx/ed1 Photo courtesy of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources