Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809, and his two-hundredth birthday in 2009 set off a year of exhibitions, readings and friendly rivalry among the cities that claim him. Boston has the birthplace, Baltimore the grave, Philadelphia the house where he wrote “The Black Cat”, and Richmond, Virginia the childhood, the first jobs and the Poe Museum.
Why Virginia
Poe’s parents were travelling actors; his father vanished and his mother died in Richmond in 1811, and the boy was taken in by the tobacco merchant John Allan, whose name he carried. He grew up in Richmond, attended the University of Virginia for one term in 1826 before gambling debts and Allan’s refusal to pay them ended it, and returned to the city in 1835 as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, where his reviews and stories first made his name. He married his cousin Virginia Clemm in Richmond in 1836. He himself called Richmond home, and his last public readings, in the summer of 1849, were there, weeks before his death in Baltimore.
The bicentennial
Richmond’s programme in 2009 included exhibitions at the Poe Museum and the Library of Virginia, a birthday celebration in January, lectures and school programmes; the museum’s newsletter documented the year. Baltimore staged a mock funeral in October with actors reading eulogies, Boston finally put up a plaque and later a statue near the birthplace, and Philadelphia’s Poe National Historic Site ran its own events. The US Postal Service issued a Poe stamp in January 2009.
The Poe Museum today
The museum, founded in 1922 in the Old Stone House, Richmond’s oldest building, holds the largest collection of Poe manuscripts, letters and belongings in the world, including his boyhood bed, his walking stick and a lock of his hair. Its “Enchanted Garden” is built with bricks from the Southern Literary Messenger building. For teachers it offers guided tours tied to Virginia’s curriculum standards, lesson plans on the poems and stories, and an annual young writers’ contest; for students, a research collection and the museum’s long-running “Unhappy Hours” and birthday events. Its website, poemuseum.org, carries the current programme.
This site is an independent publication on Poe’s life and work and is not affiliated with the museum.
