Dixon's final years were not financially comfortable. "He had lost his house on Riverside Drive in New York, which he had occupied for twenty-five years... His books no longer became...best sellers." The money he earned from his first books he lost on the stock and cotton exchanges in the crash of 1907. "His final venture in the late 1920s was a vacation resort," Wildacres Retreat, in Little Switzerland, North Carolina. "After he had spent a vast amount of money on its development, the enterprise collapsed as speculative bubbles in land across the country began to burst before the crash of 1929." He ended his career as an impoverished court clerk in Raleigh, North Carolina.