The story
On a Wednesday evening in September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe went up Church Hill in Richmond, Virginia, to say goodbye. The woman he had come to see was Elmira Shelton. They had been sweethearts as teenagers. Now she was a widow, and that month he had written to his aunt that they were going to be married.
He was leaving in the morning on business up north. He was forty, famous for "The Raven," and broke. He was born in Boston and is buried in Baltimore. So why does Richmond claim him?
His mother
Start with Eliza Poe, a young actress with a touring theater company. In 1811 the company was playing Richmond, and that December she died here. Her son Edgar was not yet three. She was buried in the churchyard of St. John's on Church Hill. Her memorial stands there today, but when people went looking for her grave a century later they could place it only approximately. Eighteen days after her death, the theater where she had performed burned down.
The Allans
A Richmond merchant, John Allan, and his wife, Frances, took the little boy in. They gave him their name, and he grew up as Edgar Allan Poe, but they never adopted him. The Allans lived well, and like a great deal of Richmond's money, theirs rested partly on slavery: John Allan's firm sold and hired out enslaved people.
As a teenager, Edgar fell for a girl named Elmira Royster. Years later she said they had been engaged, and that her father had kept his letters from her. Edgar went off to the University of Virginia and ran up debts; he later admitted he had gambled, and John Allan refused to pay the gambling debts. At eighteen, after a bitter quarrel, Edgar walked out of the Allan house, writing that he had heard John Allan say he had no affection for him. A few years later he got himself thrown out of West Point. By then Frances Allan had died and John Allan had remarried. When Allan died in 1834, his will didn't mention Edgar at all.
The Messenger
Richmond wasn't finished with him. In 1835 he came back to work for a Richmond magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger. He started as the publisher's assistant and became, in effect, its editor, writing stories for it and reviews so savage that papers far from Richmond were talking about him.
In May 1836, in Richmond, he married his cousin Virginia Clemm. He was twenty-seven and she was thirteen; on the marriage bond, a witness swore she was twenty-one. He left the magazine in January 1837, and soon after, Richmond. Ten years later Virginia died of tuberculosis at their cottage in Fordham, New York.
The house that was never his
Go looking for Poe in Richmond today and you'll find a museum in the Old Stone House, usually called the oldest house in the city. The museum itself says there's no evidence Poe ever set foot in it. The Messenger's old office building, where he is said to have worked, was torn down long ago, but its bricks were saved and built into the museum's garden shrine. The house was never his. The bricks were.
1849
In July 1849 Poe came back to Richmond. He had been a widower for two and a half years, and he was broke. On the way south he had fallen apart in Philadelphia: jail, terrifying visions, and, as he wrote, "the cholera, or spasms quite as bad."
In Richmond he found his footing. In August he lectured on poetry at the Exchange Hotel, and the local papers praised him. By friends' later accounts he went back to drinking at least once that month, and on August 27 he took the temperance pledge.
All summer he had been going up Church Hill to see Elmira. He proposed, and she asked for time. Under her late husband's will, marrying again would cost her three-quarters of her income. Around September 22, Poe wrote to his aunt that he and Elmira were going to be married, and on the 22nd Elmira wrote to his aunt herself. He was, she said, "all that you could desire him to be, sober, temperate, moral, and much beloved."
That month a Richmond photographer, William Pratt, took two pictures of him, the last known photographs of Poe. One later went to Elmira.
The last days
On Monday, September 24, he gave his lecture one more time. On Wednesday the 26th he stopped by the Messenger's office on Capitol Square. By the editor's account, Poe borrowed five dollars and left him a poem in manuscript. It was "Annabel Lee."
That evening he went up Church Hill to say goodbye. The plan was Philadelphia for an editing job, New York to bring his aunt back, then Richmond again, and Elmira. Elmira wrote that she felt wretched about him all that night. Early the next morning she went to ask after him, and learned he had already left on the boat for Baltimore.
Richmond never saw him again. On October 9, Richmond's newspapers reprinted the news from Baltimore: Edgar A. Poe was dead.
What's documented, and what isn't
Most of the Richmond story is well documented, but a few points rest on one person's word. His departure on the Baltimore boat is known from what Elmira was told the next morning. The five-dollar loan comes from the editor's own account, though the "Annabel Lee" manuscript survives. And the engagement is told two ways: in September 1849 Poe wrote to his aunt that they would marry, and Elmira wrote to her warmly about him, but years later Elmira said there had only been "a partial understanding." What happened to Poe in his first days after leaving Richmond has never been established. That's a story of its own.
Seeing it today
Richmond doesn't have his grave, but some of his city can still be visited. The Poe Museum in the Old Stone House keeps the Messenger bricks in its garden shrine. Eliza Poe's memorial is in St. John's churchyard on Church Hill, which visitors can see during the church's visitor hours. Elmira lived nearly forty more years in Richmond and is buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery, the same cemetery as John and Frances Allan. The house she rented on East Grace Street in 1849 is a private home, so see it only from the sidewalk. Check hours before you go.
Richmond has his mother, his first love, his first job as an editor, his wedding, his last summer and the last known pictures of his face. Watch the film above for the whole story.
Sources
- Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (1987), via the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore
- Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941), via eapoe.org
- Michael J. Deas, The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe (1989), via eapoe.org
- John F. Carter, "Edgar Poe's Last Night in Richmond," Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, Nov. 1902, via eapoe.org
- The Poe Museum, "About the Poe Museum"
- Encyclopedia Virginia, "Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)"
- Historic St. John's Church, graveyard
- SAH Archipedia, "Van Lew Twin Houses" (Elmira Shelton's house on East Grace Street)
- National Park Service, Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, "Poe's Romances"
- Richmond Enquirer, Oct. 9, 1849, via Chronicling America, Library of Congress
Credits
Poster: Edgar Allan Poe, Richmond, 1849, by William A. Pratt (copy plate of the September 1849 sitting), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Also in the film: an engraving after the "Traylor" daguerreotype (The Century Magazine, 1894) and the "Annie" daguerreotype (1849); Elizabeth Arnold Poe (Library of Congress); Frances Allan, John Allan and Virginia Clemm Poe (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons); views of Richmond by E. Sachse (1851), W. J. Bennett after G. Cooke (1834) and L. A. Ramm (c. 1856), and Civil War-era photographs of Rocketts, the Old Stone House and St. John's Church (Library of Congress); the Exchange Hotel and Ballard House by L. A. Ramm (New York Public Library, public domain); Historic American Buildings Survey records of the Old Stone House and St. John's Church; Eliza Poe's memorial stone (Midnightdreary, public domain); Shockoe Hill Cemetery, 2010 (AlbertHerring, CC BY 3.0) and Rocketts Landing, 2013 (David Broad, CC BY 3.0); the Southern Literary Messenger (Internet Archive, public domain); the Daily Richmond Times and Richmond Enquirer, 1849, and Andrew Talcott's 1851 map of Richmond (Library of Congress). One drawing, labelled dramatized recreation, was made for the film. Original score.