Picture a boarding house at 52 North Market Street, its wraparound porch marking the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in downtown Asheville. This two-story frame house was built in 1883 with influences of Queen Anne style, and today is preserved as a state historic site, historic house and museum within the Downtown Asheville Historic District. You can imagine a young Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) here during his boyhood; he lived in this boarding house until he left for the University of North Carolina in 1916.
In 1906 his mother, Julia E. (Westall) Wolfe (1860–1945), bought the house when it was called the Old Kentucky Home and moved in with Tom while other family members stayed on Woodfin Street. She enlarged the house in 1917, adding five rooms. Wolfe later used this very house as the setting for his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), renaming his mother’s boarding house “Dixieland” in his autobiographical fiction.
The house’s national importance was recognized when it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971 for its association with Wolfe. Julia Wolfe added five rooms to this house in 1917, and the boarding house her son renamed Dixieland still faces North Market Street.