Another Lost House? Poe's Baltimore House

Poe's Baltimore house museum has been closed.  The Baltimore Sun Times and other sources, indicate that the house will reopen under "new management."   I'm reporting this new quite late in the game, but I am stunned that the City of Baltimore has shuttered the home without a concrete plan in place to reopen it.  It's rare that house museums reopen after a period of financial duress, but I hope this precedent does not apply.

The long-time director there, Jeff Jerome, came to Philadelphia in 2009 and participated in a great event sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia: THE GREAT POE DEBATE. (You can listen to the pod-cast here, although I have to warn you this was a spectacle sport and some of it doesn't transfer to plain audio). At the debate, Poe aficionados duked it out over which city had the right to "claim" Poe.  It was both absolutely hilarious and touching.  I attended and dragged Seth, who admitted it was a great time; I was sore from laughing.  There is a great uproarious spirit in these people who love Edgar Allan Poe and who work to preserve his historic sites.
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with Kate Henry, here at Temple, who is currently thinking about Poe and Philadelphia--how his time here influenced his writing and what this might mean as we seek to understand him, his writing, and history of Philadelphia.  And I have a number of students who are writing about the Poe House this semester.

I have to think, if we didn't have the NPS Poe National Historic Site, it would be harder for us to "see" Poe here in Philly.  Poe was impoverished much of his life.  He lived in several houses other than the one that the Park Service has preserved, but, as far as I know, none of them are extant. We largely remember Poe here, because of the fact--the presence--of this house.

Now with the looming "fiscal cliff," I'm worried about the Park Service's ability to keep all of its Philadelphia sites up and running.  It's much more likely that this Poe house would be shuttered than many of the other sites that make up the Independence National Historical Park system.  And once again, I find myself wishing that the National Parks had been a much larger part of the the recent stimulus efforts--and that local sites like the Poe house in Baltimore had been too.  The CCC, during the Great Depression, insured that we have many of these sites today, and without Federal investment--through the creation of jobs that both teach us how to preserve and do the work of preservation--it's likely we'll see more such sites closed before the economy ticks back up enough to create the revenue that local governments need to keep these sites open.

Literary Philadelphia

With the help of my honors class at Temple this semester, I'm finally returning more concretely to Literary Philadelphia!  Toward first steps in mapping Philadelphia's literary heritage, we have this humble Google map.  I've just begun to plot a few known sites, but some of Philadelphia's most traditionally recognized literary minds aren't quite mapped or easily mappable quite yet.  Among the missing are George Lippard, Christopher Morley, Charles Brockden Brown, and Robert Montgomery Bird, and many others. 

On the left is an image from the City Archives of the Edgar Allan Poe house from sometime before the house came under the City of Philadelphia and before the City donated the house to the National Park Service.

The Baltimore Poe House in Trouble

After hearing that Baltimore's city officials (all of which seem nameless in recent reports) canceled the Baltimore Poe house's city funding, papers across the country have picked up the story and are going with headlines like "Baltimore's Edgar Allan Poe House May Close, Warns Curator." Seth sent me a link to a version of the story yesterday, and it was all over my facebook account this morning as all of the literary houses that I am "friends" with picked up the story and passed it around.

I've kept up the naive belief that while other historic sites were closing or in danger of closing, that literary houses had continued to do well, visitation was up; "staycations," and other incentives kept people close to home and enjoying literary domestications in ways that they did during World War II. Sure some houses have had funding problems--like Edith Wharton's the Mount, but they were in the red before the recession.

During the Great Depression, federal employees through the WPA and the CCC helped maintain and build historic sites. Mark Twain's Boyhood Home in Hannibal, Missouri got a new building and a stone firewall thanks to federal workers, the Missouri state park that celebrates his birth saw huge infrastructure support through the CCC, and even his adult home in Hartford (while it was a branch of the Hartford Public Library) had a WPA worker who visited once a week to help shelve books and catalog items in their Twain collection. I don't doubt that many of literary sites saw the great benefit of federal workers. Above is a HABS photograph (HABS itself is a public works program started in the 1930s) of Mark Twain's Boyhood Home before the federal relief workers tore down the damaged brick house next to it. On the left is an image of the house with a tiny piece of the "new" stone house that they re-built in its place. Today it serves as the giftshop for the museum.

Each of these places exists today because, in part, the relief programs of the 1930s invested in America's historic infrastructure. In the 1930s we put Americans back to work in our state and national parks. Such job programs today might do a world of good.

The Early Days of the Poe House in Philadelphia

I’ve spent the last two days of my week-long break at the Independence National Historical Park (INHP) Library and Archives looking into the early history of the Edgar Allan Poe House here in Philadelphia.

Although I’m trying to start at the beginning of the history of this site, it is hard to do. The house was purchased by a rare books and manuscripts collector, Richard Gimbel in 1933 and converted into a house museum. The image above is of the house sometime before Gimbel converted it into a house museum; this photo comes from the Library Company of Philadelphia's collection. It doesn't look much like a literary landmark yet.

In 1933 house museums, despite the Great Depression, were all the rage. Lawrence Vail Coleman, in his book Historic House Museums, wrote that there were twenty house museums open in the U.S. in 1895 and that this number grew to “nearly a hundred in 1910 and to more than four hundred now [roughly 1933].”* The Poe House was one of these new house museums devoted to celebrating famous Americans.

It appears as though Gimbel, the grandson of the founder of Gimbels department stores, saw the house as a traditional house museum. He and his curator Anthony Frayne filled the house with carefully chosen period furniture, but Gimbel also used the house as a display place for his growing collection of Poeana (which is now part of the Free Library of Philadelphia's Rare Books Collection). The museum operated as a small private enterprise, run almost entirely by Mr. Frayne and his wife Barbara until Gimbel’s death in 1971.

In 1971 the house was left to the City of Philadelphia, which deemed the Philadelphia Free Library (a branch of the city) should operate it. The photo above is a HABS photo of the inside of the house in 1976 while it was being administered by the Free Library.

Mr. Frayne died in 1973, but Mrs. Frayne lived well into the National Park Service's acquisition of the property in 1978 and its reopening after restoration and remodeling in 1981. She successfully petitioned the Park Service to let her stay on as the house's "security" after hours. She lived in the adjoining house, led tours and raised a family in the "Poe Complex" for at least 45 years.

I haven't yet been able to track down Barbara Frayne's obituary, or the records from the Gimbel Foundation relating to the 38 years that they kept the house open to tourists. My hope is that these records may be with the Free Library.

Many, many thanks to the INHP's incredibly able Archivist and Library Manager Karen Stevens who made this first foray into research on the house easy and absolutely enjoyable!

* Coleman, Laurence Vail. Historic House Museums. Washington, D.C.: The American Association of Museums, 1933, 18.