James Howard Whitty, wearing a black hat in the back row, at the April 26, 1922, opening of the Poe Shrine
Dedicated enthusiasts, scholars and descendants gathered for the grand opening of the Edgar Allan Poe Shrine at the Old Stone House on April 26-28, 1922, for a weekend of celebration and ceremonies.
The event marked the state’s first museum dedicated to a literary figure and the establishment of a study center for Poe’s literary contributions, exhibiting objects and artifacts related to the writer in one of the city’s oldest structures.
The occasion was made possible by Poe fanatic James Howard Whitty and a stylish, eccentric socialite couple, Archer and Annie Jones. Archer ran the Richmond-based Duplex Envelope Co., with a specialty in tithing envelopes for churches, and Annie was a life-of-the-party character. Chris Semtner, the longtime Poe Museum curator, observes in his book “The Poe Shrine” how they stood out in conservative Richmond. They actively supported the arts, and in a city “overflowing with churches,” the Joneses were atheists. During Prohibition, the partying couple served some of the best bootleg hooch.
At the shrine opening, they mingled among guests that included writers such as the fabulist James Branch Cabell (his banned novel, “Jurgen,” was then tied up in court) and realist Ellen Glasgow; Richmond News Leader editor and Civil War historian Douglas Southall Freeman; and artist and historian Edward V. Valentine, who was old enough to remember seeing Poe trudging through Church Hill.
The Poe bug bit Baltimorean Whitty at age 16 in 1875, after he attended the second interment of the poet’s remains and a memorial dedication that drew 1,000 spectators. The Westminster Burying Grounds monument in Baltimore resulted from a 10-year effort by schoolteacher Sarah Sigourney Rice and her students. The poet Walt Whitman spoke, and Poe biographer William Gill read “The Raven.” Whitty afterward sought to collect anything or meet anyone with any connection to Poe. His professional life coincided with the fixation by bringing him to Richmond in the 1880s.
The writer spent altogether half of his 40 years in Richmond and usually considered the city his hometown. Several people important to his life, for good or otherwise, became permanent residents in the cemeteries of Shockoe Hill and St. John’s Church.
Edgar Allan Poe’s gold pocket watch, circa 1843
Whitty in 1906 joined the Poe Memorial Association that planned a statue for the author’s 1909 centennial. Baltimore and New York scrambled to install their tributes. European writers and artists revered him. Richmond’s cultural arbiters, however, did not join in the excitement to honor Poe’s legacy. Semtner notes a saying from this period: “We’ve heard of Jesus, but we’ve seen Robert E. Lee.”
The veneration of the Confederate Lost Cause eclipsed the man who wrote “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.”
A Richmond News Leader editorial writer professed of “enjoying thoroughly the music and beauty of Poe’s poems” but admitted an inability to “divorce the poet from the man or to feel that Poe’s character as such to entitle him to perpetual honor in this community.”
Back in 1890, the mansion at Fifth and East Main streets where Poe once lived with his foster parents, John and Frances Valentine Allan, fell to wreckers. A 1916 city street-widening project necessitated the taking apart of the former Southern Literary Messenger building at the southeast corner of 15th and East Main streets, where Poe’s professional writing career began in 1835.
Whitty yearned for a reassembly elsewhere. The brick, granite and lumber sat in their deconstructed state for five years.
Meanwhile, Archer Jones walked past the Old Stone House at 19th and Main streets each day and contemplated having a museum of the Revolutionary War era there. The house, built around 1750, became saddled with the designation of Washington’s Headquarters Antiquarium and Relic Museum. To prevent further depredations, Granville Valentine purchased the house and gifted it to the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (today’s Preservation Virginia).
The Joneses and Whitty met in 1921. They soon agreed that the Stone House should become the Poe Shrine (Annie’s idea), although, as Semtner notes, the Catholic Whitty objected to “shrine” with its religious implications.
The Stone House’s backyard transformed into an “Enchanted Garden,” designed after Poe’s lines in his poem “To One in Paradise,” which included “a fountain and a shrine,” and was protected by walls of brick rescued from the Messenger, which were also used to construct a memorial pergola.
A maelstrom of controversy followed the successful launch of the museum when Whitty announced that he’d found a presumed lost portrait of Jane Stith Craig Stanard. The 15-year-old Poe almost fainted when he first met the mother of his classmate Robert Stanard. He considered Jane far from plain and the epitome of femininity. A year after their first encounter, Jane Stanard died on April 28, 1824. The trauma inspired Poe’s 1831 poem “To Helen,” she of “hyacinth hair” (meaning curly and black) and “classical face.”
Whitty, president and director of the Poe Shrine’s acquisitions, refused to donate the portrait to the museum. His intransigence outraged Annie Jones. Whitty resigned and took from the collection Poe’s desk and other ephemera. Annie ordered Whitty’s arrest should he ever dare cross the house’s threshold.
An 1856 tintype of Edgar Allan Poe, made from a daguerreotype taken three weeks before his death in 1849
Whitty retained the portrait, and over time the facts revealed that the piece did not depict Jane Stanard. Nobody knew why he believed so, contrary to all evidence. The desk and other Whitty items eventually made their way back.
Another inexplicable event shaped the museum’s early history, when on Nov. 1, 1926, Archer Jones took his own life. The year prior, Duplex went into receivership amid swirling rumors of financial improprieties. Jones left a bequest of $50,000 (now about $840,000) to the Poe Shrine.
The Shrine, renamed The Poe Museum by Douglas Freeman, evolved with the help of dedicated staff and volunteers into the world’s preeminent center for Poe studies. The collection grew, as in this centennial year, when prominent collector Susan Jaffe Tane again donated materials, this time 60 letters and objects related to Poe, including his pocket watch.
Maeve Jones, who took over as the museum’s executive director in January, calls The Poe Museum “a beast of its own nature.”
“The Poe is not only a house museum, and not a singular subject museum, it’s also a literary museum,” she says, “and I think that gives us unique freedom in our programming because we can talk about the history of the buildings, of Poe himself as a Richmonder, [and] we can delve into Poe’s works themselves.”
Students from across the Richmond region are submitting their best Poe-inspired poetry for a chance to win free tickets to the Jan. 23, 2023, Centennial Capstone at the Gottwald Playhouse, where prolific authors Nnedi Okorafor, of the “Binti” trilogy, and “Goosebumps” creator R.L. Stine will discuss Poe’s influence on their writing and the genres of horror and science fiction.
Poe’s legacy continues, evermore.
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