The Poe Museum, which celebrates its centennial this year, is located at 1914 E. Main St.
The Poe Museum this week launches a full year of centennial celebrations.
To start, on April 26 at 7:30 p.m., the museum, in partnership with In Your Ear Studios, presents a special Poe program through the studio’s Facebook page and a YouTube livestream. Members of Classical Revolution RVA perform Poe-appropriate pieces, rapper Chance Fischer provides Poe poetry, and singer-songwriter Elizabeth Wise gives her version of “voodoo blues,” capped off with the ancient and otherworldly stylings of WolvenWind.
The museum’s first UnHappy Hour of the year starts at 6 p.m. on April 28. There will be food and libations, the zombie surf rock of The Embalmers, and, most importantly, the reveal of nearly 60 Poe-related objects, letters and ephemera gifted to the museum by collector and museum board member Susan Jaffe Tane.
Edgar Allan Poe's pocket watch
Notable pieces include the gold pocket watch Poe used at the time of his writing “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which references an old man’s heartbeat as “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton.”
“Because like other beautiful things the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine must be affectionately and unselfishly cared for, to survive in a world in which the supreme values too often attach to the merely useful.” —Russell B. DeVine, Poe Shrine Secretary-Treasurer, May 1,1924
Curator Chris Semtner, associated with the museum for than two decades, notes timepieces played an important part in Poe’s fiction.
“In ‘A Descent Into the Maelström,’ they get stuck out there because their watches stop,” Semtner says of the short story’s characters, brothers caught in a whirlpool at sea during a hurricane. “And in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ there’s a big clock.”
Semtner knows whereof he speaks. He’s written three books, published through The History Press/Arcadia, including “The Poe Shrine,” and coauthored another, “Edgar Allan Poe in Richmond.” His latest, out this month, is the informative and spooky “Haunting Poe: His Afterlife in Richmond & Beyond.”
Also within the Tane collection at the museum is the engagement ring Poe gave his first and last fiancee, Elmira Royster. She’d been his teenaged intended, but her father sidelined their relationship. When Poe returned to Richmond in 1849, he renewed his relationship with the now-widowed Elmira Shelton, vowed to lay off drinking, bought this ring and posed for daguerreotype portraits. He died later that year.
The Death Room at The Poe Museum
“The Death Room [at the museum] will have really good death-y stuff,” Semtner notes. This includes the last known photograph of Poe; a piece of Poe’s coffin, which fell to pieces in 1875 when moved to another location at Baltimore’s Westminster Burying Grounds; and the edition of the writer’s work put out by his literary executor, Rufus Griswold.
While materials written by Poe such as personal and financial correspondence — and with Poe, these are often the same — are among the items in the museum archives, few complete drafts of his creative work survive. “Once the pieces were set in type,” Semtner explains, “They threw ’em out.”
A daguerreotype image of Poe
Sleuthing is required to find aspects of Poe, which gives everyone their own collage version of him. This is appropriate, since he invented the detective story.
“We’re not your typical author museum,” observes Executive Director Maeve Jones, who began her job in January. Her background is in 19th-century literature and museums — she graduated from the University of Virginia and often passed the preserved room where Poe lived during his tempestuous attendance there. She served in several positions at Monticello, which interprets another complicated genius: Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, who founded UVA, died in 1826, the same year that Poe started there.
“Poe owned little in his life, and what was left behind got scattered all over,” Jones says. “We have clues: Here’s his walking stick, his pocket watch, his handwriting in marginalia where he’s being snarky about other poets. He's leaving us puzzle pieces. We're not a house museum like for Charles Dickens in London. This is like chasing his shadow fleeting around the corner. You can sense that urgency in the people who visit here.”
A culmination of The Poe Museum’s yearlong centennial celebrations comes Monday, Jan. 23, 2023, at the Dominion Energy Center, with a Poe symposium featuring “Goosebumps” writer R.L. Stine and Nigerian-American science-fiction and fantasy author Nnedi Okorafor. Keep an eye on the museum calendar for details.
