The two-story frame house was built in 1883, influenced by
Queen Anne style architecture in the United States. By 1906, when Wolfe's mother, Julia E. (Westall) Wolfe (1860–1945), bought the house, it was a
boarding house named "Old Kentucky Home". She soon went to live at her business with Tom, while the other Wolfes remained at their Woodfin Street residence. Wolfe lived at the boarding house until he went to the
University of North Carolina in 1916. Julia Wolfe enlarged the house in 1917 by adding five rooms. Wolfe used the house as the
setting for his first
novel,
Look Homeward, Angel (
1929). Changing the name of his mother's boarding house to "Dixieland" in his
autobiographical fiction, he incorporated his own experiences among family, friends and boarders into the book. The house became a memorial to Wolfe after his mother's death (he having died relatively young of
tuberculosis). It has been open to visitors since the 1950s, owned by the state of North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources since 1976 and designated as a
National Historic Landmark. ==See also==