Poe-tober 2022

We interrupt this month of Halloween cocktails to bring you breaking news that I’m in Virginia for an Edgar Allan Poe pilgrimage. I will give you the gory details in a moment, but first let me share some other breaking news:

The Twentieth Anniversary Edition of the Dome of Foam is live!

I am aware that a number of my readers respond positively to any railroad-themed content from my road trips, so they will be especially heartened by this news. The Dome o’ Foam, for those of you not already familiar, is a quirky, hard-to-define, and entirely mesmerizing collection of railroad history and miscellanea, focusing in particular on the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Dome is the brainchild of my Uncle Edward — E.O. Gibson, to you. Alert readers will recall that Uncle Ed has periodically made appearances in this blog. The new, 20th anniversary edition of his site contains a dizzying array of new content, updates on old content, photographs, personal stories, and cartoons. You owe it to yourself to check it out here.

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So, on to my Poe trip. As everyone should have learned as a school child, Edgar Allan Poe lived in various cities of the East during the 19th century, focused largely on Richmond, VA (where he grew up) and Baltimore, MD (where he died under mysterious circumstances). Three years ago (before Covid shut down public gatherings) my friend Chris and I attended the International Edgar Allan Poe festival, held literally in Poe’s old neighborhood in Baltimore, MD. Today Chris and I bookended that trip with a visit to Poe’s old neighborhood in Richmond VA.

The main Poe attraction in Richmond is the Poe Museum on E. Main Street. You may recall that I drove right by the museum on my Route 50 trip in 2018, as Route 50 becomes Richmond’s Main Street and takes you right through the neighborhood. Alas, the museum was closed when I passed it. So this time, I was finally able to darken its doorstep.

It’s a remarkable museum, with the world’s largest collection of authentic Poe memorabilia: His bed, writing desk, walking cane, various letters, articles of clothing, photographs and daguereotypes, books, other personal effects, and even the staircase and fireplace mantel from prior Poe residences. It also has a meditation garden and major shrine to Poe.

Two cats–Edgar and Pluto–roam the museum grounds like the own the place…which in a way they do.

In front of the museum is a large granite block with Poe’s name and birth and death years inscribed on it. No, it’s not a giant tombstone; it’s the pedestal base for a Poe statue that was created in the mid-1950s–when Richmond finally decided to embrace Poe.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the pedestal base was discovered in a local landfill by some kids many years later (in 1973, to be exact). It seems that it had been rejected by the city, and a new one had been cut. This “new” base sits, with the statue atop it, in Richmond’s capitol park.

After the museum, Chris and I visited a number of other Poe-related sites in Richmond, as depicted below.

I hope that all this explains why I wasn’t able to prepare a Halloween cocktail for the blog today. I promise to double-up my cocktail posts when I get home.