Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Richmond, Virginia - Travel Photos by Galen R Frysinger, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Poe Museum

Edgar Allan Poe Museum

The Edgar Allan Poe Museum is a museum located in Richmond, Virginia, dedicated to American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Though Poe never lived in the building, it serves to commemorate his time living in Richmond. The museum holds one of the world's largest collections of original manuscripts, letters, first editions, memorabilia and personal belongings. The museum also provides an overview of early 19th century Richmond, where Poe lived and worked. The museum features the life and career of Edgar Allan Poe by documenting his accomplishments with pictures, relics, and verse, and focusing on his many years in Richmond.

Oldest House still standing in Richmond

The property on which the house stands was owned by German-born silversmith Jacob Ege in 1742. Dendrochronology suggests that the house was built in 1754. Samuel Ege, the son of Jacob and a Richmond flour inspector, owned the house in 1782 when it first appeared on a tax register. In 1824, when the Marquis de Lafayette revisited Richmond, a volunteer company of young Richmonders, the Junior Morgan Riflemen, rode in procession along Lafayette's carriage. One of the riflemen, the then 15-year-old Edgar Allan Poe, stood as honor guard outside the Ege house as Lafayette visited its inhabitants. The house remained in possession of the Ege family until 1911.

Amidst Poe's centennial in 1909, a group of Richmond residents campaigned for the city to better recognize the writer. Citizens asked the city council to erect a statue of Poe on Monument Avenue but were turned down because he was deemed a disreputable character. The same group went on to begin the Poe Museum. In 1911, the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities saved the house and opened it in 1922 as the Old Stone House.

The museum is only blocks away from the sites of Poe's Richmond homes and place of employment, the Southern Literary Messenger. It is also a few blocks from the grave of his mother Eliza Poe who was buried in Richmond's Church Hill, in the graveyard of St John's Church. Poe never lived in this home. Its completion, originally as the "Edgar Allan Poe Shrine", was announced on October 7, 1921:

This day... at a first expense of about $20,000, completes the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine, and marks the seventy-second anniversary of the death of the poet. If he is aware of mundane affairs he must be pleased to find that, at length, there has been reared to his memory a lasting and appropriate memorial.

The Poe Museum's four buildings contain exhibits focusing on different aspects of the author's life and legacy. The parlor of the Old Stone House is used for the display of furniture from the homes in which Edgar Poe and his sister Rosalie Mackenzie Poe lived. Of special interest in this room is a piano that once belonged to Poe's sister.

The Model Building contains an eighteen-foot-long model of Richmond as Poe would have known it. Also displayed in this gallery are Poe's boyhood bed and furnishings from his boyhood home. The Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building includes many first and early editions of Poe's works including an 1845 publication of "The Raven" and one of only 12 known existing copies of Poe's first collection Tamerlane and Other Poems. Among the highlights of the collection displayed in this building are Poe's vest, trunk, and walking stick and a lock of his hair. Manuscripts and rare early daguerreotypes and portraits are also exhibited there. The Exhibits Building is devoted to temporary exhibits related to Poe's place in popular culture. One such exhibit was dedicated to the many theories of Poe's death and another featured illustrations of the poem by artist James William Carling. Other recent exhibits include "Poe in Comics," "Poe Face to Face: Early Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe," and "Ratiocination: Poe the Detective."