The Edgar Allan Poe Cottage

Story

The Edgar Allan Poe Cottage is the former home of American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It is located on Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse in The Bronx, New York, a short distance from its original location, and is now in the northern part of Poe Park.The cottage is a part of the Historic House Trust, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has been administered by the Bronx County Historical Society since 1975, and is believed to have been built in 1797.HistoryPoe family yearsThe Poe family—which included Edgar, his wife Virginia Clemm, and her mother Maria—moved in around May 1846 after living for a short time in Turtle Bay, Manhattan. At the time, Fordham was rural and was only recently connected to the city by rail. The cottage, which was then on Kingsbridge Road to the east of its intersection with Valentine Avenue, was small and simple: it had on its first floor a sitting room and kitchen and its unheated second floor had a bedroom and Poe's study. On the front porch the family kept caged songbirds. The home sat on 2acre of land and Poe paid either $5 rent per month or $100 per year. Its owner, John Valentine, had bought it from a man named Richard Corsa on March 28, 1846, for $1000.The family seemed to enjoy the home, despite its small size and minimal furnishings. "The cottage is very humble", a visitor said, "you wouldn't have thought decent people could have lived in it; but there was an air of refinement about everything." A friend of Poe's years later wrote: "The cottage had an air of taste and gentility... So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw." In a letter to a friend, Poe himself wrote: "The place is a beautiful one." Maria wrote years later: "It was the sweetest little cottage imaginable. Oh, how supremely happy we were in our dear cottage home!" Poe's final short story, "Landor's Cottage", was likely inspired by the home.