From Staff Reports

HENDERSONVILLE —  The angel that inspired the title of Asheville-born author Thomas Wolfe’s classic coming-of-age novel “Look Homeward, Angel” was cleaned and assessed for repairs on Oct. 24.

Conservator Kara Warren said multiple previous repairs on the statue will likely have to be redone, according an Oct. 25 report in the Hendersonville Times-News.

The angel, located atop the headstone of Margaret Johnson (1832-1905) at Oakdale Cemetery off N.C. 64 in Hendsersonville, has undergone numerous repairs over the more than 100 years it has stood in the cemetery.

Warren told the HT-N that the epoxy used to make those repairs — along each of the statues wings, its wrist, finger and the star atop its forehead — is letting in moisture without allowing it to evaporate, accelerating the statue’s degradation.

The date the last repairs were made is unknown and the timeline for redoing those repairs has not been determined, Emily Sisler, Hendersonville city planner and historic preservation coordinator, told the HT-N.

Warren cleaned the statue and evaluated the extent of the damage on Oct. 24. She sampled the epoxy to determine what should be used to removed it.

The epoxy also is not blending aesthetically with the statue, Warren told the HT-N. She used water and a mild detergent to clean the statue — and a mild biocide for the mold on its surface.

“Look Homeward, Angel,” published in 1929 and considered to be largely autobiographical, was considered Wolfe’s masterpiece and drew the wrath of many Asheville residents when it was published because they felt Wolfe thinly disguised his generally negative depictions of them.

Wolfe’s father, W.O. Wolfe, ran a funeral monument shop on Pack Square in downtown and kept a marble angel in the window as an advertisement.

Wolfe described the angel in great detail, first in a short story and later in the novel. 

Answer Man John Boyle noted in his column in the April 13 edition of the Asheville Citizen-Times the following:

“It’s long been thought the angel in Oakdale is the one that Thomas Wolfe talked about in ‘Look Homeward, Angel,’” said Steve Hill, who was the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Historic Site manager for 34 years before retiring in 2011, 

“It turns out W.O. Wolfe had more than one over the years, and a number of them were sold. There’s one in Old Fort and another one in Bryson City,” Hill said.

In 1906, W.O. Wolfe sold one of the angels to the Johnson family in Hendersonville, and the angel has been in Oakdale Cemetery in that city for over a century.

In addition, Boyle reported, “Myra Champion, a Pack Memorial Library reference department employee and Wolfe historian, determined in 1949 that the Hendersonville angel is the one the famous author referenced.” 

On Nov. 20, 1949, the AC-T carried an article about Champion’s work, with the headline, “Hendersonville Monument Identified as Thomas Wolfe’s ‘Angel.’” Boyle added that “the story noted great debate had raged for 20 years in the mountains about which angel was the real deal.”

Champion “has followed every clue, talked to every person who might know anything, and run down every possible angel in Western North Carolina,” the article’s author, Virginia T. Lathrop, wrote. “She has established definitely that there was not just one angel which stood on the marble shop porch, but several.

“And of this collection, only one answers the description given by Thomas Wolfe in ‘An Angel on the Porch.’ That one is in Oakdale Cemetery in Hendersonville, marking the grave of Mrs. Margaret Bates Johnson, wife of the late Dr. H.F. Johnson, a minister and former president of Whitworth College in Brookhaven, Mississippi.” Wolfe later incorporated that short story into “Look Homeward, Angel.”

Boyle also wrote the following:

“In the 1980s, the late Citizen-Times columnist Bob Terrell wrote an entertaining piece about the Old Fort angel, which is similar in style and height, at nine feet, to the Oakdale angel. Terrell noted that Wolfe secured multiple angels — apparently eight of them — from an importer in Pennsylvania who bought them from the famed marble works in Carrara, Italy.

“One of these he lost to S.A. “Mac” McCanless in a poker game. McCanless had been an Asheville photographer at the turn of the last century and occasionally gambled with ‘Old Man Wolfe’ downtown.

“Terrell interviewed McCanless’ niece, Daintry Allison, who told the columnist that in 1911 she overheard a discussion between McCanless and his second wife, Geneva, about the elaborate angel he’d “bought” for his first wife. Geneva was complaining that her husband didn’t love her as much as his first wife, Hattie, because he’d never buy her such an expensive grave marker.

“I didn’t buy that tombstone,” McCanless told his wife. “I won it in a poker game.”

Hattie McCanless died Nov. 7, 1901, of a ruptured appendix, Terrell noted.

“She lies beneath the angel in Old Fort Cemetery,” Terrell wrote.

Boyle added that “Champion determined the one in Hendersonville is the real McCoy because it closely fits Wolfe’s description: ‘... it had come from Carrara, in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand. The other hand was lifted in benediction; it was poised delicately upon the ball of one phthisic foot...’”

Thos. Wolfe gets a beer

From Staff Reports

Legendary Asheville author Thomas Wolfe died in 1938, but he remains a proud part of the local scene — and on Sept. 29, he finally got his own local brew.

Catawba Brewing released Wolfeman Kolsch, a golden, clear German-style brew, at its taprooms on the South Slope, Biltmore Village and Morganton, to honor Wolfe.