Edgar Allan Poe and the Richmond Years

Edgar Allan Poe did not grow up in Boston, where he was born, or in Baltimore, where he died. He grew up in Richmond. When his mother, the actress Eliza Poe, died of tuberculosis in eighteen eleven, the two-year-old Edgar was taken in by a Richmond merchant named John Allan and his wife Frances.

The Allans dealt in cloth, wheat, tombstones, tobacco, and enslaved people, and they gave the boy their name, though they never formally adopted him. Poe was educated partly in England, where the Allans lived for several years, partly in Richmond. He returned to the city as a young man and worked here as an editor.

He edited the Southern Literary Messenger from Richmond beginning in eighteen thirty-five and built it into one of the most influential literary magazines in the South, quadrupling its circulation in roughly a year. The work he published in those years established him as a critic of national standing. His relationship with Richmond was complicated.

He spent time away, in New York and Baltimore and Philadelphia, and his struggles with alcohol followed him to all of those places. But he returned to Richmond repeatedly. In eighteen twenty-four, as a fifteen-year-old, he served as an honor guard outside the house that is now the Poe Museum when the Marquis de Lafayette visited Richmond.

The Poe Museum at Nineteen Fourteen East Main Street operates inside the Old Stone House, built around seventeen forty and considered the oldest original residential building in Richmond. Poe never lived in that specific building, but it serves as the home for one of the world's largest collections of his manuscripts, letters, and personal belongings. He left Richmond for the last time in the fall of eighteen forty-nine, and died in Baltimore in October of that year.

He was forty years old.