Join us for an evening with Dr. Gary Richards, Chair of the University of Mary Washington English Department! Dr. Richards will speak on the the life, work, and dialogue between two fixtures of Southern literature: Eudora Welty and Tennessee Williams.
This is a ticketed event. Tickets can be purchased online or at the gate. Wine will be for sale.
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED FOR SATURDAY, APRIL 8TH FROM 12:00PM-2:00PM!
Join the Poe Museum for an afternoon of family festivities on Saturday, April 8th from 12:00pm-2:00pm. This FREE EVENT is for children and families of all ages.
Enjoy Edgar Allan Poe-themed arts and crafts including coloring, magnetic poetry, black out poetry, and a gardening workshop!
Further programming will be brought to you by our wonderful community partners, Richmond Young Writers, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and local author, Phil Hilliker!
Please register HERE or by clicking the “Register here” button below.
If you would like to support the Poe Museum, please consider donating.
Poe’s Enchanted Garden is an outdoors event and in the event of poor weather, the event will be postponed.
Poe is on the move! After nearly six decades sitting across the street from the home of Poe’s first great love and muse, Richmond’s statue of Edgar Allan Poe has been displaced to make room for some newer sculptures. This is only the latest in many twists and turns in the life of Virginia’s first public Poe statue.
It all began in 1906, when a small band of writers, historians, and artists proposed the installation of a statue of Poe in the author’s hometown. Lack of funding—and a general lack of public enthusiasm—soon brought their efforts to an end. By then, Richmond was already lagging behind other cities in memorializing Poe. Baltimore had placed a Poe monument in Westminster Burying Grounds in 1875. The Actors’ Guild of New York had dedicated their own Poe monument in 1885. This was followed by the University of Virginia’s bronze bust honoring its most famous dropout in 1899. In the years after Richmond’s efforts to construct a statue stalled, Edmond Quinn sculpted a Poe bust for the Poe Cottage in Fordham (installed 1909) while Richmond’s Sir Moses Ezekiel made a statue of a seated Poe for Baltimore (installed 1922).
Fifty years later, in 1956, an eighty-seven-year-old retired Richmond physician and his wife were visiting the Poe Cottage. He stood in silence for several minutes in front of Quinn’s Poe bust before turning to tell his wife, “I shall devote the necessary time and money to have Poe recognized by a permanent memorial within the confines of the city he acclaimed as his home.”
Born in Charlotte County in 1869, Dr. George Edward Barksdale had long admired Poe’s works since wiling away hours of his boyhood reading poetry during his free time as a country store clerk. At the same time, he was studying Pharmacy and Chemistry in order to open his own pharmacy in Richmond. A few years later, he attended medical school and eventually became a surgeon and a professor at the Medical College of Virginia. The fortune earned over the course of a long and distinguished career made it possible for him to fund the construction of Richmond’s Poe statue.
Upon his return from Fordham, Barksdale wrote Virginia Governor Thomas B. Stanley, “I will engage a recognized sculptor to reproduce in bronze a life-sized likeness of Edgar Allan Poe, provided the commonwealth of Virginia will provide a substantial base for the statue to rest upon.” Gov. Stanley forwarded the offer to the Art Commission, which had to select the site and material for the base. There must have been some disagreement over the base, since a rejected sandstone version turned up in a Richmond landfill in the 1970s. (You can now see it on display outside the Poe Museum.)
For his statue, Barksdale secured the services of award-winning Pennsylvania sculptor Charles Rudy. Having attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Edmond Quinn had also studied, Rudy went on to win a gold medal from the National Sculpture Society as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most famous commissions include Noah on the Bronx General Post Office, the Confederate War Memorial on Stone Mountain, and two bas-relief profiles of Benjamin Franklin on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Rudy’s Modernist style favored simplified forms over realistic or expressive detail. Critic Bern Ikeler found Rudy’s style “clean, simple, strong.” These terms aptly describe Rudy’s Poe. The seated bronze figure sits stock-straight with his hands on his lap. One holds a pen while the grasps a stack of papers. Underneath his simple, unadorned chair is a pile of books. The face is expressionless; the pose, static. Oddly, the head bears a little more of a resemblance to the aged Barksdale than to Poe.
The sculpture may have been ready by 1956, but Virginia was not. Rudy’s bronze sat in storage for two years before finding a home on Capitol Square, in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Capitol. While the square’s many other public sculptures stood in a row at the top of the hill, Poe occupied a quiet spot all by himself near the bottom. The Arts Commission, however, decided Poe would have liked it there. After all, Jane Stith Craig Stanard, the woman Poe called “the first, purely ideal love of my soul” lived in a house that once stood across the street. As a boy, he visited her there, and she encouraged his writing. After her illness and early death, he dedicated the poem “To Helen” to her. These early verses reference Capitol Square’s classical architecture, and the last stanza begins, “Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche/How statue-like I see thee stand!” It seemed appropriate to place the statue where he could see her in her window-niche—even if he was facing the opposite direction.
Months after it arrived on the square, the Poe statue was formally dedicated on October 7, 1959—the 110th anniversary of Poe’s death. Virginia’s Attorney General, Albertis S. Harrison, Jr., presided over the ceremony. After an invocation by Dr. William B. Ward of Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Mrs. Barksdale unveiled the statue, and University of Virginia professor James Southall Wilson delivered an address. Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr. accepted the gift on behalf of the General Assembly of Virginia. The program for the event includes the text of “To Helen” but does not indicate if the poem was recited at the time or who might have done so. One person not in attendance was Dr. Barksdale, who had not lived to see the dedication.
For a town that took a while to build its first Poe statue, Richmond has become a repository for Poe statuary. Among the many pieces now at the Poe Museum are the Actors’ Guild of New York’s previously mentioned Poe monument, a copy of the University of Virginia’s Poe bust, and the plaster version of the Edmond Quinn bust that inspired Barksdale to commission his statue. In 2014, the James Michener Museum of Art even donated the full-sized plaster model of Rudy’s Poe statue, making Richmond home to two different versions.
As for Rudy’s and Barksdale’s bronze Poe, on November 22, Fine Art Specialists, experts in moving large artworks, hauled the statue and its polished granite base up the hill to the northwest corner of Capitol Square. Rudy’s Poe now rests in the shadow of Thomas Crawford’s massive 1857 equestrian statue of George Washington, which is itself encircled by sculptures of famous Revolutionary Era Virginians from Thomas Jefferson to Patrick Henry. We like to think of this as the Commonwealth’s long overdue acknowledgement that Poe is one of our literary founding fathers. Poe’s new location also places it near the entrance to the General Assembly Building where he can keep an eye on Virginia’s legislators.
1909 photograph of Edmond Quinn’s bust of Poe
One crisp Sunday afternoon in October 1987, tour guide Tom Rowe led a group of students across the Poe Museum’s garden to show them the treasure sitting on the pedestal in the Poe Shrine. Pointing toward the shadow recesses of the brick pergola, he announced, “And here’s the bust of Poe made by Edmond T. Quinn.”
Only after a couple kids asked, “What bust?” did Tom take a second look at the empty pedestal. The Poe Museum’s priceless sculpture was missing.
Quinn Bust in the Poe Shrine
Sculpted in 1908 by Edmond Thomas Quinn (1868-1929), the white plaster bust was the original model for a bronze copy unveiled in New York on Poe’s 100th birthday, January 19, 1909 and commissioned by the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences. Quinn was a perfect choice for the commission. He had studied at the nation’s most prestigious art school the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under one of the nation’s most important artists, Thomas Eakins who believed only the close scrutiny of the live model as well as the dissection of cadavers could properly prepare artists to depict the subtle nuances of human faces and anatomy in their paintings. After Eakins was fired for corrupting his female students by having them paint nude male models, Quinn followed his teacher from the Academy to continue his studies at the newly formed Art Students League of Philadelphia, where he served as curator.
Unveiling Quinn’s bronze Poe bust on January 19, 1909
The training he received under Eakins instilled in Quinn such a devotion to creating such realistic portraits that a New York Times art critic in a 1919 marveled at his mastery of “recording subtleties of expression that play like rippling water over the rock structure of the human head.” Quinn excelled at both painting and sculpture, exhibiting several works in both media at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the course of a distinguished career, he produced portraits of playwright Eugene O’Neill, poet Edwin Markham, and many other leading cultural figures of his day. His best known work is a full-length statue of the actor Edwin Booth in Gramercy Park in New York.
The Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences hired Quinn to sculpt its Poe bust and organized a grand unveiling across the street from Poe’s former cottage in Poe Park in The Bronx that would mark the occasion of the author’s centennial. About two hundred people stood in the snow to witness the ceremony in the snow. The Society also decorated the Poe Cottage with flags and built a platform next to the bust’s marble pedestal. After the firing of a salute by the Second Battery Field Artillery, the presenters pulled the cover off the bust and presented it to the city of New York. Afterwards, the celebrants moved the event indoors at New York University where Poe biographer George E. Woodberry presided over the day’s presentations and readings of Poe’s best-known poems. In a photo taken at this ceremony, what would one day be the Poe Museum’s plaster bust can be seen on a flag-draped pedestal on the edge of the stage.
Quinn’s plaster bust of Poe takes the stage at the unveiling ceremony
Shortly after the excitement of the formal unveiling and dedication died down, someone vandalized the bronze bust, which was moved into the Poe Cottage for its protection. Edmond Quinn went on to achieve his greatest success with commissions for more public sculptures over the next two decades. Then, in May 1929, he swallowed poison in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Four months later, he drowned himself off Governor’s Island in New York.
Quinn’s bronze Poe bust on display in Poe Park in 1909
Quinn’s bronze Poe bust in its present location in the Poe Cottage
Two years later, the Bronx Society of Arts and Sciences donated the plaster version of Quinn’s bust to the new Poe Museum in Richmond. Over the next half-century, the bust moved from one part of the museum to another before it finally found a more permanent home in the Poe Shrine at the north end of the museum’s garden. Although it was protected from rain, the water soluble plaster was not well suited for display outdoors, so humid Virginia summers and air pollution gradually eroded the bust’s surface.
Quinn’s plaster Poe bust in the Poe Museum’s Raven Room in 1937
In the 1970s, the Poe Museum the eccentric former physicist (who supposedly worked on the Manhattan Project) Dr. Bruce English took over as the museum’s director and president. For the more than twenty years he ran the museum Dr. English oversaw a renovation of the museum’s Old Stone House, acquired adjacent property to make a parking lot, and reinterpreted a room of the Old Stone House as a Colonial Era exhibit. This period also saw the acquisition of several important artifacts, including two daguerreotypes of Poe’s last fiancée Elmira Royster Shelton.
Bruce and Virginia English in the 1970s
By October 1987, the museum was flooded with groups of visiting students from area middle schools. Dr. English discouraged the celebration of Halloween because he feared any association with the horror genre would distract from Poe’s contributions to other literary genres like detective fiction and science fiction, but teachers loved sharing Poe’s horror stories with their classes during the Halloween season. That is why, just as today, October was the busiest month for student group tours at the museum. It was during one such tour that Tom discovered the theft of the Quinn bust.
Apparently, no one had ever considered the possibility that someone might actually take the eighty pound, twenty-two inch bust over the garden’s tall brick walls, which were topped with shards of broken glass embedded in the mortar. At the very least, the thief would have needed an accomplice, if not a crane, to get it out of the garden. “They had to carry it over an eight foot wall,” English told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “They had to carry it back over an eight-foot wall. It had to be somebody very strong.”
The staff told the police that they last recalled seeing the bust on Saturday morning, October 18, around 10:40 a.m. but that nobody had noticed it was missing until 3 p.m. on Sunday, October 19. One can only imagine how many times over the weekend the guides had pointed out the empty pedestal on their hourly museum tours while the tourists played along, not bothering to point out the mistake.
By Monday, October 20, Dr. English alerted the media and announced that he would ask no questions if the culprit would simply return the bust undamaged. He told the Richmond Times-Dispatch, “This is a major crime in the art world. I’m very disturbed.”
Around midnight on Tuesday he was awakened by a telephone call. The anonymous caller claimed to know the bust’s location but would only reveal it if English read him Poe’s poem “The Spirits of the Dead.” When English had looked up the early verse in a volume of Poe’s poetry and complied with the caller’s request, voice said, “It’s at the Raven Inn” and hung up the phone.
Meanwhile, across the James River in Chesterfield County, a man in a cowboy hat arrived at a biker joint called the Raven Inn and carried the sculpture up to the bar, ordering a mixed drink for himself and a beer for Poe. By the time the police arrived, the stranger was gone. Poe was sitting on the bar with his beer and a paper bag on which was written the poem “The Spirits of the Dead.”
Quinn’s plaster Poe on display in the Raven Room around 2005
Quinn’s bust returned to the museum, but, for its safety, English kept it indoors and displayed a replica in the Poe Shrine where it remains securely bolted to its pedestal. On occasion, visitors leave the replica notes and gifts. Some admirers place flowers, and others kiss it on the cheek. Many more pose next to it for photos.
Replica bust in the Poe Shrine in 2016
In 2008, the Poe Museum authorized the creation of more plaster copies of the bust. These soon sold, and one is even on display at the Poe House and Museum in Baltimore. More recently, in 2016, Dr. Bernard Means of the Virginia Commonwealth University Virtual Curation Laboratory brought his class to the museum to scan the bust in order to make a reduced-size 3-D print of it.
Striking a pose with the Poe bust in the Poe Shrine
Now that his days of traveling to local bars are over, the original plaster bust is currently on display in the museum’s Elizabeth Arnold Poe Memorial Building with no plans for future travel. After he retired from teaching Tom returned for a couple years to his old tour guide job the Poe Museum where he enjoyed telling the story of how he discovered the purloined Poe bust. No arrest was ever made in the case, and nobody every confessed to the crime. Earlier this year, a man taking a tour of the museum admitted he had known the thief and that his motivation had been the protection of the bust from further deterioration caused by its display outdoors. The Raven Inn has long since closed and was replaced by a used car dealership. When the bartender on duty that night back in 1987 passed away several years ago, his friends asked the Poe Museum it would send the bust to attend his funeral.
Replica bust in the Poe Shrine
In honor of the twenty-ninth anniversary its trip to the Raven Inn, the Poe Museum has named Edmond Quinn’s plaster bust of Poe its Object of the Month. Click here to learn about other Objects of the Month.
Quinn’s 1908 plaster Poe bust on display at the Poe Museum
Animation of Edmond Quinn’s bust of Poe courtesy of VCU Virtual Curation Laboratory
May 11 marks the 112th birthday of one of the twentieth century’s most important artists, Salvador Dalí. What does the great Spanish Surrealist painter Dalí have to do with Edgar Allan Poe? More than you might think.
Dalí mentions Poe at the beginning and the end of his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. In the first anecdote, Dalí describes the cultural climate in Paris in the 1930s and how everyone was reading Poe and Marie Bonaparte’s new psychoanalytical take of Poe’s work. Bonaparte’s search for hidden Freudian meanings in Poe’s work appealed to Dalí and the Surrealists, who were trying to tap into the powers of the subconscious.
Dali painting in Virginia
At the end of Dalí’s autobiography, he describes the process of writing the book. By that time he has fled the war in Europe and is living with friends in Virginia, about an hour north of Richmond. While there, he began Daddy Long Legs of Evening—Hope! (1940), his first picture painted entirely in America, and Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940).
During his stay, newspaper accounts say Dalí visited Richmond movie theaters and museums. One of his housemates, the author Henry Miller, signed the Poe Museum’s guest book. Dalí likely also visited the Poe Museum at that time, but his signature has not been located in the guest book. After either hearing Miller’s description of the Poe Museum’s Enchanted Garden or after seeing it for himself, Dalí decorated the garden at the house at which he was staying and entitled his work “The Enchanted Garden.”
Dali’s Enchanted Garden in Bowling Green, Virginia
Whether or not Poe influenced Dalí’s landscaping, he apparently inspired the painter’s writing. In fact, Dalí claimed Poe helped him write his autobiography. According to Dalí, “on certain nights the spectre of Edgar Allan Poe would come from Richmond to see me, in a very pretty convertible car all spattered with ink. One night he made me a present of a black telephone truffled with black pieces of black noses of black dogs, inside which he had fastened with black strings a dead black rat and a black sock, the whole soaked in India ink.”
After leaving Virginia, Dalí took America by storm, producing some of his best paintings, painting celebrity portraits, and collaborating with Hollywood directors Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney. Click here to read more about Dalí’s stay in Virginia.
Dali’s painting Soft Construction in Boiled Beans (1936)
This Halloween night at 6 p.m. the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia will premiere the new animated Poe adaptation Extraordinary Tales featuring the voice talents of film legends Christopher Lee (in one of his very last roles), Roger Corman (director of series of Poe films), Guillermo del Toro (director of Crimson Peak and Pan’s Labyrinth) and Bela Lugosi (the original Dracula from the 1931 film of that name). The film, directed by Raul Garcia, features adaptations of five of Poe’s greatest short stories. Click here to see a preview of the film.
Admission is just five dollars. The film will be shown on the big inflatable screen in the Poe Museum’s legendary Enchanted Garden. For more information, please call the Poe Museum at 804.648.5523 or info@poemuseum.org.
Several weeks ago, a group of Poe fans telephoned the Poe Museum in Richmond to complain that they had scheduled a tour for that day, and had just arrived only to find that the museum was closed. The Poe Museum assured them that they were, indeed, open and to come right in. The group insisted that the door was locked and the windows were dark. Suspicious, the museum representative asked where exactly they were. Quoth the tourists “Baltimore.”
Wrong museum. And who could blame them? For Poe fans, there is no Walden Pond. A pilgrimage for us does not end at one tidily preserved home-turned-museum like it does for fans of some well-known authors. Along the East Coast, there are no fewer than eight major destinations associated with Poe. Differentiating between the Poe Cottage, Poe Museum, Poe House and Museum (also known as Poe Baltimore), the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, two graves, and his birthplace in Boston can be problematic to say the least. And this is without considering the Poe Arch at West Point, his dorm room at the University of Virginia, and Sullivan’s Island in Charleston.
There have been efforts over the past 166 years to recognize one of the cities associated with the master of the macabre as the Poe-est place of all. This would not only give one lucky city highly-coveted bragging rights, but would also provide fans with a more contained, convenient Poe experience. Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Richmond have positioned themselves as the main contenders for playing host to Poe’s legacy. Each has a unique and valid reason for claiming Poe, but despite their best efforts, Poe refuses to be claimed.
Poe was born in Boston, but he grew up in Richmond, and died in Baltimore. He wrote many of his finest works in Philadelphia, but “The Raven” was not finished until New York, where he would watch his wife succumb to tuberculosis. The man simply would not stay put.
Much of this was, of course, due to his persistent lack of funds. Always on the brink of financial ruin, Poe went wherever he felt he could turn his literary and editorial talents into cold, hard cash.
The biggest mistake that can be made, however, is to assume that Poe’s lifestyle was driven solely by financial embarrassments. Throughout his career, he led a quiet revolt against the idea of rooting oneself and one’s writing in a single location.
An example of this can be found in his tenure as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.
As the name suggests, the Messenger was founded to encourage the creation of Southern literature. As editor, Poe was supposed to contribute articles and stories dealing with issues unique to genteel, Southern culture. It was his chance to show the world that he was a Richmonder (if not born, then certainly bred). Had he done what was expected of him, the Poe Museum would probably be the undisputed capitol of Poe-dom.
But Poe did no such thing. Instead, his first short story for the Messenger was set in an unidentified (but definitely not southern) region, and featured a protagonist with a Greek name who digs up his deceased fiancée in order to extract her teeth. It’s worth noting that the same issue also featured pieces entitled “The Village Pastor’s Wife,” “Sketch of Virginia Scenery,” “Courtship and Marriage,” and “To the Bible.”
Poe’s “Berenice” was not a rejection of Richmond or Southern culture—merely a rejection of regionalism. For Poe people, this little act of rebellion is both irritating and oddly freeing. We will never be able to pin him down, never be able to contain his weird and wonderful legacy in one convenient location. But is that such a bad thing?
A Poe pilgrimage makes for an epic road trip. Tracking his legacy will take the stout of heart (and car) from the boom of Boston to the wilds of South Carolina. The Poe experience is unlike any other because Poe was unlike any other.
In short, the group that found itself in Baltimore instead of Richmond had the right idea. Getting lost in what J.W. Ocker calls “Poe-Land” is both incredibly rewarding, and is possibly the best way to pay homage to Poe’s life.
But of course, we don’t want you to stay lost. If you’re looking for the Poe Museum, our address is 1914 East Main Street, Richmond, Virginia. We love visitors, and Pluto and Edgar (our black cats) love a good massage.
The Edgar Allan Poe Museum turned ninety-three this week. The above photograph was taken at the opening ceremony, which featured distinguished guests, readings of original Poe letters and manuscripts, and a tea party. Below is the program for the event, which was held on April 26-28, 1922.
The world of Poe scholarship has produced countless books, papers, and scholarly articles; but rarely has it produced a work of art. While the written works of Poe scholars like Burton Pollin (1916-2009) and Thomas Ollive Mabbott (1898-1968) have contributed greatly to our understanding of Poe’s life and work, the sculpture of Richmond schoolteacher Edith Ragland (1890-1989) has provided posterity an invaluable resource for understanding Poe’s life in Richmond. As meticulously researched as some academic papers, Ragland’s model reconstructs the city Poe knew in a way words alone cannot. That is why the model is the Poe Museum’s Object of the Month for March 2015.
According to an undated manuscript written by Poe Foundation co-founder Annie Boyd Jones (d. 1947), the sculptor Edward Valentine (1838-1930) proposed the project. Valentine studied sculpture with August Kiss in Germany before enjoying a celebrated career in Richmond. In addition to sculpting the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis for Richmond’s Monument Avenue and the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee for the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, Valentine produced “The Recumbent Lee” for Washington and Lee University. Valentine was also a historian with a special interest in Edgar Allan Poe. In 1875, he became one of the privileged few to be able to interview Poe’s last fiancée Elmira Royster Shelton. In 1898, he and his brother, Mann S. Valentine II, founded the Valentine Museum, which owned a number of Edgar Allan Poe letters in addition to a portrait of Poe’s foster mother Frances Allan. After retiring from sculpting in 1910, he devoted much of his remaining years to the study of Richmond history and the presidency of the Valentine Museum. By 1922, the eighty-four-year-old Valentine took an interest in the newly opened Edgar Allan Poe Museum, speaking at its opening ceremony as well as donating a portrait of Poe’s foster mother to the Museum’s collection.
One evening in 1924 or 1925, Mrs. Jones spent several hours talking about old Richmond in Mr. Valentine’s parlor. He told her he had spent the last sixty years researching a book about Richmond history but had accumulated so much information he could not edit it sufficiently to publish it. As she was leaving, he pointed out a photograph of a photograph of a model of old Paris and exclaimed, “Wait a minute girl; here’s what you do. Make a model of Richmond in Poe’s Time and place it in the [Poe Museum’s] Old Stone House!”
Mrs. Jones offered to manage the project if he would sculpt it, but he replied, “Oh go away girl, you know I can’t work anymore, but you are an enthusiast—you will get it done…Now go ‘long and make it.”
As soon as she returned home, she told her husband, Archer G. Jones, who enthusiastically supported the idea. She later recounted, “I could see his inventive mood creeping into his eyes.”
The first obstacle to constructing the model was finding an artist to do the work. The solution came one day when Gutzon Borglum (1867-1941) visited the Poe Museum. Borglum was an accomplished sculptor who would later rise to fame for his carving of the presidential monument at Mount Rushmore. The party accompanying Borglum to the Poe Museum included Julia Sully (1870-1948, granddaughter of Poe’s friend, the painter Robert Matthew Sully, 1803-1855) and the young teacher Edith Ragland. During the course of the afternoon, Mrs. Jones mentioned her idea for the model of Richmond to Sully, who recommended Ragland for the project. Jones asked Ragland to build the model, but Ragland replied, “I would not know the first or the remotest way to go about.”
“Nonsense,” Sully answered, “You model beautifully. None of us knows how to go about it, so will all learn together.”
In this spirit of collaboration, Edward Valentine and City Hall supplied Ragland Photostats of maps at no charge, and the Poe Museum paid the Virginia State Library for Photostats of more maps. Valentine provided his notes on Richmond history, city directories, and Virginia Mutual Insurance records. Ragland also consulted Samuel Mordecai’s (1786-1865) 1856 book Richmond in By-Gone Days, an account of life in the city during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Archer Jones insisted that a model of Richmond needed to accurately reflect the city’s hills, so he suggested carving the topography out of wood. According to the Poe Foundation board minutes for March 18, 1925, “Miss Ragland found that she needed some knowledge of engineering in order to make the correct elevations in her model so she set to work to study that subject.” She built the model on three connected stretcher tables covered with blocks of wood nine inches thick. With the assistance of surveyors, she chiseled those blocks into the hills and valleys of 1840s Richmond.
She also wrote to artists to determine which materials to use. Because she had been advised the technique would waterproof the model, Ragland covered the piece with asphaltum, a substance similar to tar. To this, she added a thin layer of plaster. When the plaster dried, she applied a layer of lead white gesso. She modeled the houses and churches from clay and let them air dry rather than firing them. She fashioned trees from pieces of sponge and wire. She then colored them with oil paint.
Ragland built the model in the Poe Museum’s Old Stone House. Upon completion, the model measured approximately eighteen feet wide and six feet deep and represented the city from about Fifth Street to Twenty-Eighth Street and from the James River to Marshall Street. This includes depictions of such sites as Poe’s boyhood home Moldavia, Poe’s mother’s grave at St. John’s Church, and the Virginia State Capitol. The most impressive aspect of the model’s creation is that it was constructed in a room measuring only nine feet wide, leaving the artist about one and a half feet of clearance on each side. Ragland, herself, was self-deprecating when speaking of her accomplishment. In a 1976 interview with Denise Bethel, Ragland humbly recalled that the work was fairly easy because the insurance records and maps told her exactly what structures to place on each block. She boasted that some old-timers told her she had even reproduced the correct trees in the right places.
In 1926, tragedy struck when Annie Jones’s husband committed suicide for financial reasons. Mrs. Jones decided that, once complete, the model would be presented to the Museum in his memory.
When Ragland completed her model in 1927, the Poe Foundation’s president, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist Douglas S. Freemen reported to the Foundation’s board, “This is undoubtedly a work of charm, art and beauty. It is the creation and expression of experts—in invention, engineering, research and execution—but as a map of Richmond complete accuracy is most desirable.” He stressed that the gift would not be accepted by the Poe Foundation “until its accuracy at every point is beyond question.”
The minutes of the January 1928 meeting of the Poe Foundation’s board state that the model’s “accuracy is now vouched for by City engineers and surveyors, by Mr. E. V. Valentine, Dr. Stanard [editor of The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography] and other authorities, and that it ties up with Mordecai—except where he himself is inaccurate.” Dr. Freeman moved that the board formally accept the model into the Poe Museum’s collection, and the motion passed. So accurate was the model that Richmond historian Mary Wingfield Scott was able to create a key that identified most of the houses and buildings. In all, the model contains twenty-two identifiable taverns and hotels, fifteen churches, at least twelve public buildings, and the homes of several “distinguished citizens.”
The model was on continuous display in the room of it construction for forty years. In 1963, the Poe Museum renovated a neighboring building for the display of the model. In order to move the model, city workmen cut it into three pieces. Then six off-duty Richmond policemen, five off-duty firemen, and four other city employees volunteered to move the pieces to their new exhibit space. Several buildings and trees detached from the model in the six-hour process.
Ragland returned to the work on her model, reconnecting the three segments and reattaching the fallen houses. The Poe Foundation agreed to pay her $600 for her work in addition to cab fare from her home to the Museum three days a week for three months. Mrs. R. S. Reynolds donated a custom-built glass case for the model. The work was complete (for a second time) by December 6, 1964 when she appeared in a Richmond Times-Dispatch photograph (below) with her freshly restored masterpiece nearly four decades after she began work on it. To protect the work from further damage, Mrs. R. S. Reynolds donated a large glass case to protect it.
The model’s story continued well after Ragland completed her work. In 1981, an anonymous donor concerned by the object’s apparent state of deterioration offered to pay for its restoration. President of the Richmond Jaycees and graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts, Sergei Troubetzkoy conducted the repairs and repainting. Because the model remained on display during this process, he was only able to work on it while the Museum was closed and when he was not working at his day job. As a friend of Edith Ragland’s, Troubetzkoy knew of some details she had intended to include if time had allowed, so he added fences and other buildings he could document. Although he planned to do so, he was unable to add the fence around Capitol Square.
In 1999, the model was almost lost when a fire started in the room housing it. In fact, much of the room was destroyed. The tables underneath the piece were severely damaged, and firemen shattered its glass case. Smoke and water caused additional harm. In the wake of the fire, the Museum called conservators to assess the damage. The wood and paint had cracked. Several houses had again become detached. Additionally, a thick layer of dust and spiders had built up on the model in the years before the fire.
In consultation with 1717 Design Group, the Museum decided to reinstall the model in a new case facing the opposite direction. In order to rotate the model, a volunteer cut it into two pieces using the 1964 cuts as a guide.
With the guidance of historic object conservation specialist Russell Bernabo, artist Chris Semtner and art historian Michelle Dell’Aria cleaned and repaired the model over the course of six months. They first divided the surface into a grid of twelve-inch squares. Each square was carefully dusted into a tiny vacuum attachment. Pieces of rubber sponge were then used to remove grime that was not loosened by the dusting. Only when needed and when it could be performed without damaging the paint layer, wet cleaning was performed using a mixture of alcohol and water. In the course of their work, the conservators found that the original paint was often too unstable to clean but that a previous restorer’s applications of acrylic paint could be cleaned without damaging the surface. Additionally, they observed that the base layer of asphaltum had bled through the plaster and paint to discolor the topcoat. They glued houses back in place and reattached flaking paint and plaster using a solution of B-72 and xylene. In painting was conducted only sparingly. When this work was complete, they reattached the two halves of the model and filled and in-painted the seam.
Carpenters carefully removed the model from its damaged original tables and attached it to a new custom-made table and built a new case around it. In order to make the piece easier for guests to view, the Museum enlisted a team of volunteers from Open High to tilt the model to a twenty degree angle while the carpenters secured it in place. The model was then displayed with one side against the wall. Because the long ends of the model were not perpendicular, the Museum added extensions to allow the long end to sit flush against the back wall.
Museum guests were able to watch the entire conservation process through a large window in the gallery and to ask the conservators questions. Seeing a large dead spider perched atop one of the houses, a guest commented, “If the spiders were that big in Poe’s time, no wonder he wrote the kind of stories he did.”
After this major conservation project, the model received occasional cleanings using soft brushes and vacuums. The most notable of these was conducted in 2008 with the help of volunteers from Hampton Hotels’ Save-a-Landmark program.
Over ninety years after Edith Ragland began her masterpiece, this model of Poe’s Richmond remains a highlight of the Poe Museum’s collection—a resource to visiting historians as well as a favorite with the Museum’s youngest visitors. Like few other historical documents, Ragland’s model helps the viewer visualize the city, its topography, and its structures as Poe would have known them.
The Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia is excited to launch the historic reunion of iconic author Edgar Allan Poe and legendary horror actor Vincent Price over Halloween weekend, October 31, 2014 and November 1, 2014. This not-to-be-missed weekend kicks off with the family-friendly Poe Goes to the Movies on Halloween night, and culminates with a wine tasting experience like no other on Saturday, November 1 with The Author’s Appetite. Both events will be held at the Poe Museum located at 1914-16 East Main St. Richmond, VA 23223. Proceeds benefit the Edgar Allan Poe Museum’s educational programming.
Poe Goes to the Movies takes place on Halloween night, Friday, October 31 from 6:00pm-10:00pm and includes a variety of fun and frightening activities including an appearance by Vincent Price’s daughter, Victoria Price who will introduce the film Tales of Terror starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone. A special slate of guests will join Price as jurors for the Poe “look-a-like” contest and costume contests. Guests will also have the opportunity to experience the opening of the museum’s newest gallery, The Raven Room that will showcase the ca. 1882 illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” created by artist James Carling. This will be the first opportunity that the public will get to experience these one-of-a-kind drawings since they were designated one of “Virginia’s Top 10 Endangered Artifacts” in Virginia in 2013, and it will be the first opportunity to see the new book about the illustrations by Poe Museum curator Christopher P. Semtner. Cash bar sponsored by Richmond’s Triple Crossing Brewery. Tickets to the Halloween night event are $20 per person ($5 for children under 12) and can be purchased at the museum or through the Poe Museum Online Store by clicking here.
The Author’s Appetite follows on Saturday, November 1 from 6:00pm-10:00pm and will provide an unforgettable evening for wine and literary lovers alike. Highlighting Vincent Price’s love of Richmond and its cuisine this culinary adventure will be the first opportunity to sample the Vincent Price Signature Wine Collection with labels by artists Abigail Larson and Gris Grimly. Complimenting this unique wine experience will be hors d’oeuvre by Chef Ken Wall of the Dining Room at the Berkeley Hotel along with desserts by pastry chef Cornelia Moriconi of Can Can Brasserie, both of which are inspired by recipes from Vincent Price’s now renowned cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes. Throughout the event, Victoria Price will share memories of her famous father and sign copies of her recent memoir Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography. Guests will also be treated to the exotic live music of Richmond favorites, the Tim Harding Quartet, as well as a silent auction, private talk with the curator of the Poe Museum’s new exhibition The Raven Room, and performances of Poe’s works by historical interpreter Anne Williams. Tickets are $50 per person and can be purchased at the museum or at through the Poe Museum online store by clicking here.
Additional programs highlighting Vincent Price at the Poe Museum Weekend include a guided walking tour at 10:00am on Saturday, November 1, featuring the graves of Edgar Allan Poe’s many friends and relatives buried at Shockoe Hill Cemetery, which is located at 4th and Hospital Streets in Richmond. There will also be a guided walking tour of Poe sites in Historic Shockoe Bottom at 2:00pm on Sunday, November 2. Please meet at the Poe Museum. Make Richmond a destination over Halloween Weekend at Richmond’s historic Linden Row Inn, which has partnered with the Poe Museum to create a fabulous weekend package including two nights’ accommodations and tickets to all of the weekend’s events. Visit www.lindenrowinn.com or click here for details about this special offer. If you would like a combined admission rate for the events without the hotel room, click here.
About Vincent Price:
Actor, writer, and gourmet, Vincent Leonard Price, Jr. was born in St Louis, Missouri. He traveled through Europe, studied at Yale and became an actor. He made his screen debut in 1938, and after many minor roles, he began to perform in low-budget horror movies such as House of Wax (1953), achieving his first major success with the House of Usher (1960). Known for his distinctive, low-pitched, creaky, atmospheric voice and his quizzical, mock-serious facial expressions, he went on to star in a series of acclaimed Gothic horror movies, such as Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971). He abandoned films in the mid-1970s, going on to present cooking programs for television and writing “A Treasury of Great Recipes” (1965) with his second wife, Mary Grant. He also recorded many Gothic horror short stories for the spoken-word label Caedmon Records. Vincent Price died at age 82 of lung cancer and emphysema on October 25, 1993. (Source: IMDB MINI BIOGRAPHY BY LESTER A. DINERSTEIN)
About Edgar Allan Poe:
Edgar Allan Poe is the internationally influential author of such tales of “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat.” He is credited with inventing the mystery genre as well as with pioneering both the modern horror story and science fiction. Poe died under mysterious circumstances at the age of forty. Although much of his life is known through contemporary documents, some areas of his life remain shrouded in mystery.
About Victoria Price:
Following in her father’s footsteps, Victoria has become a popular public speaker on topics ranging from the life of her famous father Vincent Price to interior/industrial design, as well as topics in the realm of the visual arts such as the role of the art collector in society and learning how to see. In 2012, she was delighted to be invited to be a TedX speaker at TedX Acequia Madre. Over the past fifteen years, Victoria has spoken around the world to audiences who have enjoyed her ease and erudition in sharing her enthusiasm for a joy-filled life in the arts. The 2014 edition of her book Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography was released in August 2014.
About the Edgar Allan Poe Museum:
Opened in 1922, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond hosts the world’s finest collection of Poe artifacts and memorabilia. The five-building complex features permanent exhibits of Poe’s manuscripts, personal items, and a lock of the author’s hair. The Poe Museum’s mission is to interpret the life and influence of Edgar Allan Poe for the education and enjoyment of a global audience. Poe is America’s first internationally influential author, the inventor of the detective story, and the forerunner of science fiction; but he primarily considered himself a poet. His poems “The Raven”, “Annabel Lee”, and “The Bells” are considered classics of world literature. The Edgar Allan Poe Museum was recently recognized by TIME Magazine as Virginia’s “Most Authentic American Experience,” by Publishers Weekly as one of the “2013 Top Ten Literary Landmarks of the South,” and the “2013 Top Ten Things To Do in Richmond” on the Huffington Post.
During “Vincent Price at the Poe Museum,” legendary horror actor Vincent Price and iconic author Edgar Allan Poe reunite this Halloween Weekend (October 31-November 1, 2014) at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia.
The weekend kicks off Halloween night, October 31, from 6-10 P.M. with Poe Goes to the Movies, a costume contest and film screening hosted by Vincent Price’s daughter, Victoria Price. Ms. Price and a panel of special guests will help judge the costume contest and Poe Look-Alike Contest. Then Victoria Price will introduce the movie Tales of Terror starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone. The evening will also include the opening of the Poe Museum’s newest gallery, The Raven Room, featuring James Carling’s original ca.1882 illustrations for Poe’s poem “The Raven.” Poe Goes to the Movies will be a fun, frightening evening with games, tricks, and treats for the whole family. Admission for the evening is $20, and proceeds benefit the Edgar Allan Poe Museum’s education programming.
The following evening, November 1 from 6-10 P.M., the Poe Museum will host The Author’s Appetite, featuring the new Vincent Price Signature Collection wines in addition to Vincent Price’s foods prepared from recipes in his own cookbook. Victoria Price will share some her memories of her famous father. The evening will also feature performances of Poe’s works by Anne Williams, a book signing by Victoria Price, curator talks in the new Raven Room. Admission for the evening is $50 and will benefit the Edgar Allan Poe Museum’s educational programming.
For more information, contact the Poe Museum at 804-648-5523.
Like many businesses, the Poe Museum was closed on July 4th for Independence Day. As we observe the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we might not realize that Poe would have celebrated the holiday, too.
At the time of Poe’s birth in 1809, only thirty-three years had passed since America had declared its independence from England. Such Founding Fathers as the author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson and the nation’s second president John Adams were still alive. In fact, Poe would enter Jefferson’s University of Virginia while its founder was still residing at nearby Monticello. (Jefferson’s death occurred while Poe was at the University–on July 4.)
The spirit of the American Revolution was ever present during Poe’s childhood. His grandfather, David Poe, Sr. had been honorary Quartermaster General of Baltimore during the Revolution and a friend of the Marquis de Lafayette. In Richmond, Poe would have attended Sunday services at Monumental Church with John Marshall, who had served in the Continental Army long before becoming Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Poe would have also seen the “Virginia Giant” Peter Francisco, who fought the British with distinction at the Battle of Brandywine, the Battle of Germantown, the Battle of Stony Point, and other battles before witnessing Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Both Marshall and Francisco are buried at Richmond’s Shockoe Hill Cemetery along with Poe’s foster parents and a number of his friends. Another Revolutionary War hero living in Richmond during Poe’s time was the “Hero of Stony Point” Major James Gibbon.
When Poe was fifteen, he was honored to serve on the honor guard selected to escort the Marquis de Lafayette on the latter’s 1824 tour of Richmond. Poe must have known about the friendship between his grandfather (who had died in 1816) and the Frenchman. While in Baltimore during the same United States tour, Lafayette visited Poe’s grandfather’s grave. According to J. Thomas Scharf’s Chronicles of Baltimore (1874):
“The next day he [Lafayette] received visitors at the Exchange and dined with the corporation, &c., &c., and in the evening visited the Grand Lodge; after which he attended the splendid ball given in Holliday Street Theatre, which had been fitted up for the occasion. After the introduction of the surviving officers and soldiers of the Revolution who resided in and near Baltimore, to General Lafayette on Friday [October 8, 1824], he observed to one of the gentlemen near, ‘I have not seen among these my friendly and patriotic commissary, Mr. David Poe, who resided in Baltimore when I was here, and of his own very limited means supplied me with five hundred dollars to aid in clothing my troops, and whose wife, with her own hands, cut out five hundred pairs of pantaloons, and superintended the making of them for the use of my men.’ The General was informed that Mr. Poe was dead but that his widow [Elizabeth Cairnes Poe] was still living. He expressed an anxious wish to see her.
“The good old lady heard the intelligence with tears of joy, and the next day [October 9, 1824] visited the General, by whom she was received most affectionately; he spoke in grateful terms of the friendly assistance he had received from her and her husband: ‘Your husband,’ said he, pressing his hand on his breast, ‘was my friend, and the aid I received from you both was greatly beneficial to me and my troops.’ The effect of such an interview as this may be imagined but cannot be described. On the 11th General LaFayette left the city with an escort for Washington.”
Being surrounded by reminders of the American Revolution during his childhood might have influenced his decision to enlist in the United States Army when he was eighteen, but he hired a substitute to serve the remainder of enlistment after just two years.
Poe would have observed the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence during his lifetime. Celebrations of one kind or another had been taking place since 1776 when, on July 8, Philadelphians hearing a public reading of the Declaration of Independence started shooting into the air, lighting bonfires, and exploding fireworks (although the name Independence Day was not used until 1791). Before long, similar celebrations were being held throughout the young nation, and they increased in popularity after the War of 1812. By Poe’s time, Independence Day celebrations could include parades, cannon fire, bonfires, the ringing of bells, drinking, and fireworks, but the day did not become a national holiday until 1870. Unlike the Poe Museum’s employees, Poe worked on Independence Day. We know this because there are business letters written by him dated July 4.
The Poe Museum will reopen at 10 A.M. on July 5 and will be open its regular hours the rest of the weekend.
