LOCALS
the WOODSMAN In University Park, a retired professor with an unusual practice by AYN-MONIQUE KLAHRE photography by JOE PELLEGRINO
T
om Wolcott has led an interesting life. He and his wife, Donna, are both retired professors of marine sciences. They’ve studied sea urchins, ghost crabs, and the mating habits of blue crabs. Their research has taken them from California to the Carolina coast to the Chesapeake Bay, from Bermuda to Panama to the Virgin Islands — once spending months on a boat with their dog and two young children, a box of Legos, and weekly trips to the library to keep the kids occupied. But here, in landlocked Raleigh, and particularly in their University Park neighborhood, they’re better known for a different kind of scientific practice: the careful and conscious heating of their home through an old-fashioned fuel, firewood.
In 1973, Tom and Donna bought their “starter home” on Henderson Street. Modest though it was — a brick one-story, with Tudor flourishes along the facade — it was an easy walk to North Carolina State University campus, where both worked as professors. “It was all we could afford at the time, and not in too splendid of a condition, but not having to commute was quite a blessing!” says Tom. The home, built in the 1940s, was heated by a coal furnace in the basement which had been “clumsily” converted to oil. “It was horrendously inefficient,” says Wolcott. A tinkerer by nature, he soon found himself in the crawlspace looking for a solution, where he discovered the old coal grates. They sparked an idea: retrofit the furnace a second time, but this time to burn wood. It worked. The Art & Soul of Raleigh | 33
