Wake County, NC - William Oliver Wolfe

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William Oliver Wolfe, father of novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe (1900-1938), was 
a Raleigh resident in early Reconstruction days. William Oliver Wolf, son of 
William Oliver Wolf of Pennsylvania, was twelve at the time of the Battle of 
Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863); his older brother, George Wolfe, was killed at 
Chancellorsville; Jacob Lentz, his sister's husband, was killed at Gettysburg.  
In 1865 at fourteen, William Oliver Wolf, with "wanderlust in his veins," went 
to work with his brother, Wesley Wolf, in Union mule camp at Harrisburg. At the 
close of the war the Wolf brothers went to Baltimore, and William Oliver Wolf 
became a stonecutter's apprentice. Until 1871, he worked there and in York, when 
he came to Raleigh, where he labored as a mason and stonecutter on the 
construction of the new state penitentiary and later set up his own marble shop.  

John Cayton and Wolfe had a marble shop on East Morgan Street. At some time 
during this period he adopted the currently used spelling of Wolfe for his name.  
The Cayton and Wolfe signature is on Seth Jones' tomb in eastern Wake County; 
the Wolfe signature is on the tombstone of "Martha J. Allen, wife of Colonel 
C. B. Allen, daughter of Drewry and Delilah King (1815-1897)" in Oakwood 
Cemetery, in Raleigh, near the gravesite of Leonidas L. Polk.

While a Raleigh resident, Wolfe was married twice: first, to Hattie J. Watson, 
who divorced him; second, to Cynthia C. Hill, a milliner nine years his senior.  
When his second wife's health failed, they moved to Asheville, where she died 
in 1884. On January 14, 1885, William Oliver Wolfe married Julia Elizabeth 
Westall, formerly of Swannanoa, then living in Asheville, to whom was born 
Thomas Clayton Wolfe, the last of their children, on October 3, 1900, at 92 
Woodfin Street. Richard Walser characterized Julia Wolfe as "...energetic, 
earthy, fun-loving, and egocentric..." and William 0. Wolfe as "imaginative, 
assertive, restless and sometimes glum...."

In March 1936 Thomas Wolfe went south for the first time since the publication 
of LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL. Returning from New Orleans, he stopped off at the 
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater, and Raleigh, 
where his former school mate Jonathan Daniels gave a dinner for the prominent 
novelist. Earlier William Oliver Wolfe had had a vision of a lawyer-son
traditionally trained at the state university to occupy the Governor's Mansion 
at Raleigh.

Literary historian Richard Walser, in an article entitled "By Any Other Name" 
in RALEIGH MAGAZINE (Wake County Bicentennial Issue, 1971), wrote: "By far the 
most famous reference to Raleigh in fiction is found in Thomas Wolfe's LOOK 
HOMEWARD, ANGEL (1929)." While attending the university at Pulpit Hill, Wolfe's 
autobiographical hero visits his married sister at Sydney. She lives in a 
boarding house only two blocks from the Governor's Mansion. The two go in 
search of the spot where, years before, their father operated a tombstone 
cutting shop. Sydney, writes Wolfe with remarkable and caustic brevity, is 
a town of thirty thousand people, sleepy, with quiet leafy pavements, and a 
capitol square in the center, with radial streets. At the head of the main 
street, across from the capitol, a brown weathered building of lichened stone, 
was a hotel--the largest and most notorious brothel in town. There were also 
three denominational colleges for young women."

On October 21, 1976, the Thomas Wolfe Room of the Sarah Graham Kenan Library 
at St. Mary's College was dedicated with John T. Rice, president of the College, 
Fred Wolfe, 80, brother of Thomas Wolfe and resident of Spartanburg, South 
Carolina, and John U. Tate, Jr., chairman of the Department of English, as 
participants. At a dedication banquet later that evening, Walser, emeritus 
professor of English, North Carolina State University, delivered an address on 
"The Wolfe Family in Raleigh." Several first editions of the works of Wolfe are 
included in the fourth largest institutional collection of Wolfe works in the 
United States. Fred Wolfe indicated to students that his brother's literary 
works would continue to live and be read; he is the only surviving brother of 
the novelist.

Mabel Wolfe Wheaton, about 65, sister of Thomas Wolfe and wife of Ralph H. 
Wheaton of Asheville, died in Asheville on September 29, 1958. Mrs. Wheaton 
was said "to be more like the famed author than his other brothers and sisters.
She was a "large, jolly woman with a zest for life," stated her obituary in 
THE NEWS AND OBSERVER (September 30, 1958). In 1950, in Asheville, the writer 
met Mrs. Wheaton briefly and discovered her charm, friendliness, loquaciousness 
and outgoing personality and was presented a post card size picture of the 
novelist. 

Source:
Elizabeth Reid Murray Collection
"People" - Box 3 of 3
Olivia Raney Library

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This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by
Elizabeth Reid Murray
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