Qualla: Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia)

Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Packer1028, CC0. In 1909, on the hundredth anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth, a group of Richmond citizens asked the city council to put a statue of the writer on Monument Avenue, where Confederate generals stood in bronze. The council said no. Poe, they reasoned, was a disreputable character - a drunk, a debtor, dead at forty in a Baltimore hospital under circumstances no one could quite explain. The same group, undeterred, decided to build their own memorial in their own way. They acquired the Old Stone House on East Main Street, a squat 1740 dwelling that was already the oldest original residential building in Richmond, and turned it into a shrine. Poe had never lived in the house. He had stood guard outside it once, as a fifteen-year-old volunteer rifleman, when the Marquis de Lafayette visited Richmond on his 1824 American tour. That was enough of a thread to weave a museum from.

Image: Packer1028 | CC0

Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia): The Old Stone House

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poe Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0. The house itself was built around 1740 by a German immigrant named Jacob Ege, who had come from Germany to Philadelphia in 1738 and continued south to the James River settlements with the family of his fiancee, Maria Dorothea Scheerer. He built the stone walls as what tradition c...

Image: Poe Museum | CC BY-SA 4.0

Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia): Why Richmond

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poe Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0. Poe's connection to Richmond was real, even if he never slept under this particular roof. He grew up here after his actress mother Eliza died and the orphaned boy was taken in by the wealthy Allan family. He worked here as a literary critic and editor at the Southern Literary Mes...

Image: Poe Museum | CC BY-SA 4.0

Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia): The Enchanted Garden

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, CC BY-SA 4.0. Behind the museum is a small courtyard the founders called the Enchanted Garden, laid out around motifs from Poe's writing. The design takes its inspiration from his poem 'To One in Paradise.' There is a fountain. There is a shrine. There is a rock inscribed with a character's na...

Image: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts | CC BY-SA 4.0

Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, Virginia): Pilgrims

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Morgan Riley, CC BY 3.0. The museum has attracted its own ecosystem of devotees over the past century. The actor Vincent Price, whose film career became inseparable from Poe adaptations, visited in 1975 and posed with the museum's famous stuffed raven. In 2014 his daughter Victoria Price came to the muse...

Image: Morgan Riley | CC BY 3.0