Oakdale Cemetery is on the way out of Hendersonville heading toward Brevard on Sixth Avenue West, US-64.
Marble statue from the Asheville shop of W.O. Wolfe. Inspired title of son Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. Stands 150 feet south.
It is a big cemetery, twenty-two acres. Oakdale Cemetery includes black, white and Jewish burials and a Paupers’ Cemetery. It is cared for by Hendersonville’s Public Works. This is where the Look Homeward Angel is.
There is also an octagonal frame pine bead-board pavilion that was built around 1900, a Neoclassical concrete mausoleum, and a brick mausoleum built in the 1940s.
Look Homeward Angel (Thomas Wolfe’s Angel)
Author Thomas Wolfe’s first novel was Look Homeward, Angel. In the book Wolfe describes a stone angel carved from Carrara Italian marble. Thomas Wolfe’s father, W.O. Wolfe, sold the statue to the Johnson family to mark the family plot in Oakdale Cemetery.
The angel marks the grave of Margaret E. Johnson (1832-1905). It is behind a tall metal fence. You can see the angel and the fence from the highway.
The most famous, recognizable, and admired gravemarker is the large Italian marble Angel towering above the grave of Margaret E. Johnson (1832-1905), from the shop of W.O. Wolfe, who kept Angels at his shop as advertisements and inspired Thomas Wolfe’s book Look Homeward Angel.
Oakdale Cemetery
National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form
United States Department of the Interior
How are the graves older than the graveyard?
Oakdale Cemetery was started in 1885, but there are graves that are earlier. You can find graves with death dates from the 1850s. That is because two churches, the Methodist Episcopal Church and the First Presbyterian Church moved their graves to Oakdale Cemetery.
A Little More About the Angel
Oakdale Cemetery’s gravemarkers from the 1880s to 1955 have decorative funerary art motifs such as flowers, drapery, clasped hands, crosses, hands holding roses, ferns, and ivy…
The most commanding, elegant, and well known example from this period is the Italian marble angel marking the grave of Margaret Bates Johnson (1832-1905). Situated in the Johnson family plot, now encircled by a rock enclosure with metal fence, the angel was erected on its current location by William O. Wolfe, father of novelist Thomas Wolfe, of Asheville, North Carolina. Although not carved by W. O. Wolfe, the angel sat on the porch of Wolfe’s Pack Square marble workshop in Asheville as an advertisement for his business. Wolfe sold the monument to Johnson’s daughter for $1,000 after visiting her and taking with him photographs of some of the gravemarkers at his Asheville shop, as well as this angel…
The marble angel stands over fifteen feet tall with a lily in her left hand and her right hand pointing upward.
The angel is work and stonecutting art that very few in the profession were able to master during the time that it was carved. W. O. Wolfe, the Asheville marble cutter, who operated a marble works on Pack Square placed this and other Italian marble angels in front of his shop as advertisement and as crown jewels of the trade that he so regularly admired and aspired to create. The detailed and precise carving required to produce a large marble angel like Oakdale Cemetery’s angel was beyond the grasp on W. O. Wolfe and other marble cutters in North Carolina.
Oakdale Cemetery
National Park Service / National Register of Historic Places Registration Form
United States Department of the Interior
Directions to Thomas Wolfe’s Angel from Meadowbrook Log Cabin
From Meadowbrook Log Cabin, turn right on US-25. Follow the signs to West US-64 (6th Ave), toward Brevard. You will see the angel with a history marker in the cemetery on the left just after Prince Drive.
