Tales of Talavara

Privately owned and bearing no historic plaque to distinguish it, Talavara at 2315 West Grace Street was the home of Thomas Talley, a local grocer whose daughter Susan was acquainted with Poe.

Here Poe gave what must have been his last public reading of “The Raven”, on September 25, 1849, and this is credited with having saved the 1838-vintage residence when so many other buildings long ago disappeared. It supposedly survived the Civil War because there was a wall of cannon surrounding it.

Social calls and late “suppers”

Having reunited with Elmira, Poe made plans to sail for New York (no doubt having second thoughts about train travel), probably to collect Maria Clemm and move their belongings back to Richmond. Just before his departure on September 27, 1849, he called on his friend Dr John F Carter at his office somewhere around at Seventh and Broad Streets. They chatted for awhile and then Poe went across the street to Saddler’s Restaurant for a late supper, mistakenly taking Dr Carter’s malacca cane and leaving behind his own. Edgar’s cane changed hands several times over the next decades, coming to rest in the Poe Museum.

In her 1907 biography, Susan Weiss, who actually knew Poe, said he met some acquaintances at Saddler’s “who detained him until late, and then accompanied him to the Baltimore boat. According to their account he was quite sober and cheerful to the last, remarking, as he took leave of them, that he would soon be in Richmond again.”

Yet another scribe, Bishop Fitzgerald, claimed that Poe left Richmond with as much as $1,500, earnings from his lectures that would finance his new magazine. This could have made him a target for muggers. No money was found on him when he was discovered semi-conscious shortly before his death.

Someone at the door

Poe sailed by steamship from Richmond to Baltimore overnight on September 27 and 28, 1849. What exactly he did in the few days remaining to him are as befuddled as he seems to have been. “Where he spent the time he was here, or under what circumstances, I have been unable to ascertain,” his cousin, Neilson Poe, wrote to Maria Clemm. No one else has figured it out either.

One biographer claimed that Poe, somewhat intoxicated, came to see Dr Nathan Covington Brooks, but was told he was out of town. Brooks, an historian, poet and owner of the the American Museum literary magazine, which published several works by Poe, was the first principal of Baltimore City College, then a public high school.

Another home to haunt

This is where Maria Clemm moved her family in late 1832. No 3 Amity Street (it’s now No 203) was in the countryside then, a respite from the city for her, daughter Virginia, her mother and Edgar, her nephew. The following year Poe had a series of his poems published in a Baltimore newspaper and then, with “MS found in a Bottle”, won a cash prize for fiction in the same paper’s writing contest.

He was struggling all the same, though, being denied a mention in the will when his foster father died in 1834. He laboured, by one account, in a Baltimore brickyard, and was snubbed for a teaching position at a Baltimore public schools. When his grandmother Elizabeth died in 1835, the family lost out on her small pension too.

Edgar’s cousin, Neilson Poe, pictured here, offered to take in Maria and Virginia, but Edgar wanted to keep the family together, so he proposed to Virginia. Finally, in the summer of 1835, he moved to Richmond and got a job editing the Southern Literary Messenger, bringing Virginia and Maria along.

The Edgar Allan Poe Society has a nice page on the house.

The Raven and other jobs

Though some sources say the Exchange Hotel, where Poe gave another of his 1849 lectures on “The Poetic Principle”, stood at the corner of Fourteenth and Franklin Streets, a more reliable one places it in the Baltimore Exchange Building, alongside branches of the Bank of the United States and the US Treasury and the merchants’ exchange beneath a dome. The edifice opened in 1820, just in time for the economy to collapse, and until its demolition in 1901 housed mostly federal agencies. The replacement dates from 1907, and Google Earth fan normal42 has made a fine Sketch-up model of it.

Also at the Exchange Hotel, Poe read from “The Raven”, the poem that had sealed his success when it was published in Philadelphia in 1845. Though never wealthy, he was forever hopeful of comfort. Even in his final months he was able to write to his Aunt Maria, “Keep up heart. I hope that our troubles are nearly over.”

Poe had moved to the City of Brotherly Love in 1838 and stayed for six years, helping edit Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine. “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque”, which featured “The Fall of the House of Usher”, came out in 1840, and the following year “Murders in the Rue Morgue” — the first modern detective story.

In 1842 there were “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death”, and Poe impressed Charles Dickens, who was touring America, by guessing the ending to “Barnaby Rudge”.

Poe quit Graham’s Magazine in May that year, disgusted with its “contemptible pictures, fashion plates, music and love tales”. In 1843 he published “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Gold Bug” and “The Black Cat” and revived plans for a magazine of his own, which he wanted to call The Penn but was persuaded to go for The Stylus instead. It was to raise money for this that he came back to Baltimore.

Emptying Boyd’s bottles

There’s an account that Poe downed two glasses of whiskey one night in 1846 here at a bar of some sort run by the bottlers John Boyd & Son at 9 South Gay Street. Sitting across from Edgar, on the other side of one of the bottles the Boyds made, was Robert D’Unger, who got an earful about not being in a hurry to get married. Just over a year later, not long after Virginia’s death, Poe was back in Baltimore crying on D’Unger’s shoulder. There’s no indication whether Poe revisited Boyd’s establishment on his final trip to Baltimore in 1849.

Advice from the fallen

In the summer of 1848 Poe stopped in Baltimore on a journey from Richmond to New York and, again according to Robert D’Unger, visited Mary Nelson’s social club, which was here in what used to be Tripolet Alley. One of the girls who worked here, evidently nicknamed “Lenore”, earned a brotherly kiss from Poe, along with advice to change her ways.

Later that year “The Bells” was published, and Edgar won a promise of marriage from the widowed poet Sarah Helen Whitman — if he could stop drinking. He did, but only for a month, and the engagement was called off.

Among the Odd Fellows

Did Poe revisit the Seven Stars Tavern in 1849? It was somewhere on Water Street. Nineteen years earlier he’d accepted a bet from a man named John Lofland, known as “the Milford Bard”, who said he could write more verses of poetry at a single sitting than anyone. Poe lost, and had to pay for their dinner and drinks. Days later, Poe left Baltimore to enter West Point.

The Seven Stars is far more famous as the birthplace of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows in America.

Inebriated wisdom

There were a lot of “odd fellows” in Baltimore in Poe’s day, and still are — see Thomas Wildey’s statue on Broadway Avenue. In January 1844 the Egyptian Saloon was part of the Odd Fellows Hall that stood at 30 North Gay Street. Poe gave a lecture on American poetry in the saloon.

By then he and Virginia and Aunt Maria were living in New York, where Edgar worked as an editor with the Evening Mirror, possibly the Sunday Times and ultimately the Broadway Journal, of which he became the final owner.

Ghost at a gallop

The bar now known as The Horse You Came In On, on Baltimore’s Thames Street, enjoys a reputation as the last place Poe hoisted a few before his death in 1849, and fans like to talk about a ghost called “Edgar” who haunts the upstairs rooms.

The pub may well be able to trace its lineage to a horse stable in 1775, and could even be “the oldest saloon in America”. But contrary to the belief that Poe was “found near death” in the street outside, that happened across town.

Here’s a lively page about the bar.

Democracy in action

“There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th Ward Polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A Poe, and who appears in great distress.” So read the note dispatched to Poe’s friend JE Snodgrass on October 3, 1849. Its author had evidently come across Poe in the street near Cornelius Ryan’s 4th Ward Polls, also known as Gunner’s Hall, a tavern that doubled as an election polling place — thirsts quenched in exchange for votes. The pub was here at 44 East Lombard Street.

Snodgrass answered the summons with Poe’s uncle, Henry Herring, found Edgar apparently drunk, and took him to hospital by carriage. Snodgrass’ claim of intoxication is countered by, among other evidence, a physician’s subsequent failure to find any trace of alcohol in Poe’s system.

Regardless, a popular theory about Poe’s death centres on Ryan’s bar: He was a victim of a “cooping”. In the rough and tumble of urban electioneering in those days, it wasn’t uncommon for innocent bystanders to be grabbed off the street and detained in a room called a “coop”, where booze and beatings (and possibly opium) convinced them of a particular candidate’s merit. They were then dragged from one polling station to another, casting multiple votes, and their clothing was often changed to disguise them.

When Poe was discovered in the street here, he was wearing, in place of his own suit of black wool, one of stained, faded gabardine, with worn-out shoes and a straw hat, none of which fit him.

The shade is drawn

Poe was brought here to Washington College Hospital, now called Church Hospital. Dr John Moran took charge of his treatment in the tower on the lower, nearest corner in this view, on the second floor above the entrance. Poe reportedly lapsed in and out of consciousness, but to Moran’s questioning gave only “incoherent and unsatisfactory” answers. The doctor said that, on the evening prior to his death, Poe repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds”. No one has been able to determine who this would have been.

Another cousin, Neilson Poe, came by the next day but was told that Edgar was in no state for visitors. The day after that Neilson was told that Edgar was “much better” and sent him a change of linen.

Edgar Allan Poe died at about 5am (3am by another account) on Sunday, October 7, 1849. Dr Moran later wrote to Maria Clemm that his last words were “Lord help my poor soul”. He arranged for the body to repose in the hospital’s rotunda, where it was viewed by “some of the first individuals of the city” and several dozen women keen to snip a lock of his hair.

No autopsy was performed, and other medical records and the death certificate vanished long ago, so the cause of death remains a mystery. The press alluded to “congestion of the brain” and “cerebral inflammation”, which readers would have interpreted as the just desserts of heavy drinking. It must be noted that Rufus Wilmot Griswold, pictured here, despite the fact that he became executor of Poe’s literary estate, had long feuded with him and, in his subsequent writing, undermined Poe’s reputation. The widespread perception of Poe as a drink- and drug-addled loony is primarily Griswold’s work. His claims were denied from the outset and ultimately proved false.

Other theories: tuberculosis, epilepsy, diabetes, rabies, heart disease, delirium tremens, dipsomania, hypoglycaemia, porphyria and, as recently as 1999, epilepsy and carbon monoxide poisoning, as well as being “cooped” or beaten up in other circumstances.

Novelist Matthew Pearl, whose 2003 debut “The Dante Club” was a bestseller, wrote “The Poe Shadow” in 2006 and had a notion while reading the archives of the University of Virginia and Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. He noticed that some newspaper accounts of Poe’s exhumation — in 1875, when his remains were moved to another grave — indicated that the brain had been visible to onlookers.

One claimed that a “medical gentleman” observed that Poe’s brain was “in an almost perfect state of preservation” with “no signs of disintegration or decay” despite being diminished in size. Another reported that the church sexton had lifted up Poe’s head and saw the brain rattling around inside, “dried and hardened”.

A coroner told Pearl that if the body isn’t embalmed, the brain is the first organ to liquefy and would have been long gone after 25 years. On the other hand, a brain tumour could calcify, and that could be what was rattling around.

In 2005 Poe scholar James Hutchisson suggested that the poet could have died from a brain tumour, noting that the attending physician, Moran, initially cited “congestion of the brain” as the cause of death.

Washington College Hospital opened in 1836 but was a financial failure. When the staff abandoned it two decades later they left behind a lot of bones and other bits from their anatomy classes. The neighbours tried to burn the place down, probably because it was widely believed the staff used to raid the nearby cemetery for fresh cadavers. “After the sun went down you hardly ever saw a person anywhere near it,” one account says.

An Episcopalian group revived the facility in 1857 as Church Home and Infirmary, and here it was that Poe’s aunt, Maria Clemm, lived for a 12 years until her death in 1871. Since the 1990s it’s been simply Church Hospital. There’s an historical marker outside, a bronze plaque indicating where Poe’s room had been, and another in the lobby, donated in 1909 by an admirer.

Not quite at rest

At about 4.30pm on October 8 (or possibly 9), Poe’s remains were interred alongside his grandfather’s outside Westminster Hall. Rev William Clemm, a relative, officiated. A small gathering saw him placed in a grave that remained unmarked until 1875, although cousin Neilson had at one point ordered an engraved stone, but it was broken during delivery.

Sara Sigourney Rice finally launched a campaign to honour the poet in 1865 and gradually money was raised for a marker that is off by a day on his birthdate. Poe’s remains were moved to a more prominent location in the yard. The monument that was dedicated in 1875 — with Walt Whitman in attendance and letters read from Longfellow, Whittier and Tennyson — has no epitaph, even though no less a figure than Oliver Wendell Holmes made suggestions for one. Ten years later the remains of Virginia Poe were moved here from New York.

The contention that it wasn’t Poe who was dug up and moved gets a convincing run on the United States Naval Academy’s detailed but sometimes whimsical website Poe Perplex, but it’s dismissed by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore here. Both of these sites can tell you about the mysterious “Poe Toaster”.

This is the gravestone that marks Poe’s original burial spot, against the church wall. In the Google Earth image below, his actual grave with the large monument is hidden by foliage at centre left, immediately inside the chuch gate off the street. Thousands of casual passers-by must glimpse it daily.

Qrisse’s Edgar Allan Poe Pages have remarkable 3D Cortona graphics of the graveyard and tombstones.

Where did I leave that trunk?

One hand raised and head tilted, Poe hears the muse in a monument sculpted by Sir Moses Ezekiel. Now outside the University of Baltimore Law School, the bronze statue was originally unveiled in 1921 in Wyman Park, having been commissioned in 1907 by the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore. World War I got in the way: Sir Moses lived in Italy. One of the Inscriptions reads, “Dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before”.

In the wake of Poe’s death in 1849 there were high hopes that some of those dreams were set out on paper in the trunk he was travelling with. Finding it proved a challenge, though the key was in Poe’s pocket. Once recovered, its literary contents evolved from being of mere passing interest to being worth a mighty battle for possession. The ostensible trunk and key are now at the Poe Shrine in Richmond, although their provenance, like everything else, is in dispute.

Seemingly in spite of having been been forcibly given a new wardrobe, Poe still had the key and Dr Carter’s walking stick in his possession when peeled from the pavement outside the 4th Ward Polls. Carter’s cane was supposedly returned to him, but what happened to Poe’s cane, with a blade allegedly hidden inside? It was passed down to various other people and also ended up with the Poe Foundation. Or was it?

FURTHER BROWSING:

The exhaustive annals of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore
His writings online at Gutenberg and eServer
Raymond Adam Biswanger’s photo-biography from the 1950s at Penn Libraries