ASHEVILLE, N.C. — Six years after fire nearly reduced the historic Thomas Wolfe House to a pile of charred rubble, the drafty old boarding house in downtown Asheville has been painstakingly restored to its 1916 condition.

Furniture lost or damaged has been replaced or restored. Even the rough plaster walls of the day have been restored — to the same half-finished look they had when a young Wolfe left home to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

AP Photo/Alan Marler (ENLARGE)
Six years after fire nearly reduced the house to a pile of charred rubble, the drafty old boarding house in downtown Asheville has been painstakingly restored to its 1916 condition
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Related: • Boyhood home almost a character in Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel"
Key dates in the history of the Thomas Wolfe House: 1883: The seven-room house at 48 Spruce St. in downtown Asheville is built by a banker for his daughter and son-in-law. It's later expanded to 18 rooms. 1906: Julia Wolfe, author Thomas Wolfe's mother, buys the house, which was named "Old Kentucky Home" and moves in with 6-year-old Thomas, to run it as a boarding house. 1916: The house is expanded to 29 rooms. Thomas Wolfe leaves Asheville to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 1918: Thomas Wolfe's brother, Ben, dies of pneumonia in an upstairs bedroom. The scene is later reprised in "Look Homeward, Angel." 1929: Thomas Wolfe's first novel, "Look Homeward, Angel," is published. Negative local reaction keeps him away from Asheville for eight years. 1937: Thomas Wolfe returns home to a warm reception. 1938: Thomas Wolfe dies of tubercular meningitis at age 37 in Baltimore 1939: The house is auctioned by a bank to pay for defaulted mortgages and unpaid taxes. Julia Wolfe continues to live in the house. 1942: Julia Wolfe buys the house back. 1945: Julie Wolfe dies at 85 and the house passes to her surviving children. 1948: The Old Kentucky Home is purchased by the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Association from the family. 1973: The house is designated a National Historic Landmark 1975: The state of North Carolina begins operating the site as a State Historic Site 1998: An arsonist sets fire to the house. No arrest has ever been made. 2004: After six years, the restored Thomas Wolfe Memorial reopens to the public.

But good luck getting Steve Hill, site manager at the memorial site for more than a quarter of a century, to admit that the still-unsolved July 1998 arson turned out for the best.

"You could pull both my arms out their sockets and I would never say the fire was a good thing," Hill said. "But when it's said and done, it took something like this to help its long-term presentation."

Among other changes resulting from the lengthy restoration process, the 6,000-square-foot Queen Anne-style house at 48 Spruce Street is no longer painted white — as it had been for years before it burned.

"It's a shade below canary yellow," said Hill, who oversaw the effort to restore the 121-year-old, 29-room structure to the way it was when Wolfe's mother Julia rented its small bedrooms to travelers in the first part of the 20th century.

The house was memorialized as "Dixieland" in Wolfe's 1929 novel, "Look Homeward, Angel."

Restored at a cost of $2.4 million, Wolfe House is reopening to the public this weekend. Most of the funding came from insurance, but private gifts ranging from $35 to four-figure donations helped restore hundreds of pieces of furniture and other artifacts damaged in the blaze.

The restored boarding house reflects Julia Wolfe's penny-pinching ways.

"Julia paid $6,500 for the house in 1906 and she was always adding rooms," Hill said. "She didn't always pay to have the work done right."

For example, when she added about a dozen rooms in 1916, she did not bother to pay for a final coat of plaster.

"She told the workers to omit the final coat, or the skim coat," said restoration architect Joe Oppermann. "They stopped at the brown coat and had no top coat, so it's rougher than some of the other plaster."

The house's restorers asked workers to mimic that half-done feel.

"The big challenge is to not gild the lily," Oppermann said. "It was a flop house. Tom did not know what room he would sleep in every night until he looked to see which rooms were occupied and which ones were empty. There were a lot of people down on their luck who slept there.

"We were not trying to create something different from it was," he said. "It was the life that he lived."

The fire did a lot of damage to some parts of the house and left other parts virtually untouched. Just one baluster of the main staircase burned; a short distance away, in the dining room, the fire burned so hot that it turned a silver tea service into a pool of molten metal.

Investigators believe the fire started in the dining room, where most of the damage occurred. Among the items destroyed was the large table where the Wolfe family and their guests broke bread nightly.

That is where a young and impressionable Thomas Wolfe met drifters and travelers whose personalities and characteristics appeared in his later writings.

The pieces that replaced the original tables and chairs offer one thing the originals did not have, Hill said.

"Visitors will be able to sit down at this table," he said. "We never could have done with the original table because it was so fragile."

In the entrance hall, Mission-style oak chairs were spared but the photographs on the walls were consumed by flames.

The house has 13 fireplaces, some with ornate mantels. While one in the front room was undamaged, another in the dining hall was destroyed. Using old photographs provided by Hill, a local woodworker built an identical walnut replica mantel at a cost of $13,000.

In all, the fire destroyed about a fourth of the house's furniture and artifacts, Hill estimated. But an outpouring of support — both money and talent — from area residents helped bring the Wolfe House back to life.

"We happen to live in an area with a lot of people who really care and who are well-qualified to help," Hill said.

Donated warehouse space was used to store furniture and other artifacts that were removed from the house, but could not immediately be restored.

Curators from the nearby Biltmore Estate came to help remove and clean charred furniture and other pieces.

Like a nervous parent, Hill is edgy about reopening the house to the public after the fire. He locked the front screen door when he took a visitor on a tour of the house's second floor.

Behind the screen door is one lasting remnant of the fire. The wooden front door — which was carefully restored after it had been painted and repainted several times — still shows the marks from a fireman's ax from that fateful night.

"We thought it was important to leave it that way," said Hill.

While it still looks to most visitors like it did in the early part of last century, the house now features a modern sprinkler system and security system, Hill said.

Despite his own doubts that the restoration could live up to his expectations, Hill is pleased with the outcome.

"People will know we're been here, but we want it to be like the house in 'Homeward Angel,'" he said. "We'd like people to have the impression we were never here. ...

"When I come inside the house in the late afternoon, it just looks like we came in and gave it a good cleaning."

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If You Go...

LOCATION: 52 North Market St., Asheville, N.C.

HOURS: April - October, Tuesday-Saturday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m., Sunday 1-5 p.m.; November - March, Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m., Sunday 1-4 p.m.

ADMISSION: Adults, $1; students, 50 cents.

CONTACT: (828) 253-8304; Wolfe Memorial