The big yellow boarding house at 52 North Market Street was run by Thomas Wolfe's mother, Julia, between 1906 and 1916. Her son later turned the house, and the people who passed through it, into the fictional Dixieland of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. It is one of the most thinly disguised settings in American fiction, and the house itself was kept largely intact after his death.
The visitors' centre next door tells Wolfe's short story — he died of tuberculosis at thirty-seven — with manuscripts, photographs, and a few of his enormous personal possessions; he was six foot six and wrote standing at the top of a refrigerator. The house tour walks through bedrooms still set up as they were for paying guests in the 1910s.