The Poe family arrived in Fordham around May 1846: Edgar, his wife Virginia Clemm, and her mother Maria. They had left Turtle Bay, Manhattan, seeking cleaner air for Virginia, who was already suffering from tuberculosis. Fordham was not yet part of the Bronx, and the rural community had only recently been connected to the city by rail. The cottage's owner, John Valentine, had purchased it from Richard Corsa on March 28, 1846, for $1,000. The house was tiny and sparsely furnished, but visitors found something in it that transcended its poverty. "The cottage is very humble," one guest noted. "You wouldn't have thought decent people could have lived in it; but there was an air of refinement about everything." Another friend remembered it differently still: "So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw." Poe himself, in a letter, called the place simply "beautiful."

The cottage years were among Poe's most productive. He published "The Literati of New York City," a series of provocative, gossip-tinged profiles of literary figures including Nathaniel Parker Willis, Margaret Fuller, and Lewis Gaylord Clark. Their publisher, Louis Antoine Godey, promised they would "raise some commotion in the literary emporium" -- and they did. Poe's final short story, "Landor's Cottage," was likely inspired by the home itself. He befriended his neighbors, the Valentine family, and even served as baptismal sponsor for a local boy who was named Edgar Albert in his honor. He grew close to the faculty at St. John's College -- now Fordham University -- and their church bells gave him the sounds that would structure "The Bells," with its four stanzas tracing the arc of human life from silver sleigh bells to iron funeral bells.

The cottage's downstairs bedroom was where Virginia Poe fought her losing battle with tuberculosis. Family friend Mary Gove Nichols visited and left a devastating account: "One felt that she was almost a disrobed spirit, and when she coughed it was made certain that she was rapidly passing away." Virginia died in that room on January 30, 1847, and was buried three days later in the vault of the Valentine family. Poe remained in the cottage, increasingly erratic and despondent. He left Fordham in the summer of 1849 and died under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore on October 7 of that year. His mother-in-law Maria, still in the cottage, did not learn of his death until October 9, two days after it happened and after he had already been buried. She moved out shortly afterward, ending the Poe family's brief and sorrowful tenancy.

The preservation campaign for Poe's cottage reads like a century-long tug of war. The house was sold at auction in 1889 for $775 to William Fearing Gill. The New York Shakespeare Society purchased it in 1895, and an 1896 article titled "Shall We Save the Poe Cottage at Fordham" drew endorsements from Theodore Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, William Dean Howells, and Henry Cabot Lodge, among others. In 1905, the state legislature authorized $100,000 for a park and restoration, though critics argued the cottage would lose its authenticity if moved. The decision was finally made in 1910, and on November 13, 1913, the cottage was dedicated at its new location in Poe Park at the corner of Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse, a short distance from where it had originally stood.

The cottage was designated a Bronx landmark in 1962 and an official New York City landmark in 1966. Vandalism plagued the site through the 1970s, but live-in caretakers eventually reduced the threat. In the late 1990s, a graduate student in philology lived in the basement, studying words in the house of a man who had mastered them. A visitor center designed by architect Toshiko Mori opened in 2008, the first NYC Parks project completed under Mayor Bloomberg's Design and Construction Excellence Initiative. Today the cottage sits in its small park, dwarfed by the Bronx around it, offering visitors a startling encounter with scale: the greatest American writer of horror and mystery once lived in this modest wooden house, listening for bells.