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.

On Becoming a Docent...

I recently took the last step to become a volunteer docent at the Rosenbach Museum and Library here in Philadelphia. For years now, I've been visiting historic houses, and thinking snide thoughts about those terrible docents (none of which you'll find at the Rosenbach, BTW). The docent who told Seth and I at Monticello that there were no special passageways, doors, or "servant" spaces built into the house, the docent who goes on and on about rope beds and the origins of "Sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite," the docents who insist that we all think back to that simpler time in the past--all the times I wanted to break away from the drone and explore the house on my own.

Now I'm one of them. Despite all my academic training and deep knowledge that the past was, and is, never simple, I think the mode of the house museum tour is hard to break (see Linda Norris's excellent "What Makes Historic House Tours So Boring"). I found myself, on my test-tour, slipping into "this painting was painted by a famous and important painter," which of course reflects no critical reflection on what made Thomas Sully a sought-after portraitist in his day or what makes him interesting today...and what the heck counts as "important?" Thankfully, the education coordinator at the Rosenbach pointed out when I was stuck in the meaningless "way-back-machine" mode of the historic house tourguide.

I think I finally felt the "trap" of the tourguide in Henry James's "The Birthplace." I suddenly have new sympathy for the long-time live-in guide at the Poe House (before it came to the NPS) that told people in a hushed voice, quite incorrectly, that, "This is the doorknob [added in 1920, long after his residency] that Edgar Allen Poe touched." Perhaps she couldn't help herself?

Where is literary Philadelphia?

Since we moved here in June, I’ve visited a few literary sites: the NPS Edgar A. Poe House and the Marianne Moore room at the Rosenbach in particular. The Marianne Moore room probably shouldn’t count as literary Philadelphia really because it is a depiction of literary New York transplanted to Philadelphia (but still, it’s amazing). But I’ve driven by the Owen Wister house and been inside the school that George Lippard attended, both in Germantown (Concord School in HABS/LOC image on the left). I haven’t yet tracked down any Charles Brockden Brown sites, but that will be my next project.

It seems odd that someone has not already traced out an elaborate literary tour of Philadelphia. (If you know of such a literary tour, let me know!)

A few weeks ago, I talked to Ken Finkel of Temple University, formerly of WHYY and the blog The Sixth Square, about this. He indicated that over the years a few people have been interested in either starting up literary tours of Philadelphia or were generally interested in writers from the Philadelphia area. I’m tracking down leads currently, but in the mean-time I’m setting out on my own to see what the city has to offer the literary tourist.

I’ll start with Charles Brockden Brown and the current exhibition at the Library Company, “Philadelphia Gothic: Murders, Mysteries, Monsters, & Mayhem Inspire American Fiction, 1798-1854” for the background to my project. I hope to get to it as soon as holiday travels are finished.

Though it’s hard to think of Center City Philadelphia today as the setting behind Gothic novels like Lippard’s Quaker City, one place where you can see a touch of this is at Eastern State Penitentiary. Though it was built after Charles Brockden Brown’s time, there today visitors can get a sense of early criminality in Philadelphia and see how Quakers sought to reform convicts through institutionalizing forced personal reflection. You can see how an edifice built to inspire meditation on personal sins became a fortress-like prison, simultaneously modern and medieval. It only closed in 1971. So perhaps my tour of literary Philadelphia, or at least Gothic Philadelphia began here with Dickens' impressions of the prison on his tour of it in 1842.

From Dickens' American Notes, "PHILADELPHIA, AND ITS SOLITARY PRISON"

In the outskirts, stands a great prison, called the Eastern Penitentiary: conducted on a plan peculiar to the state of Pennsylvania. The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.

In its intention, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature.

I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. I hesitated once, debating with myself, whether, if I had the power of saying 'Yes' or 'No,' I would allow it to be tried in certain cases, where the terms of imprisonment were short; but now, I solemnly declare, that with no rewards or honours could I walk a happy man beneath the open sky by day, or lie me down upon my bed at night, with the consciousness that one human creature, for any length of time, nomatter what, lay suffering this unknown punishment in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.

... Every facility was afforded me, that the utmost courtesy could suggest. Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view, and every piece of information that I sought, was openly and frankly given. The perfect order of the building cannot be praised too highly, and of the excellent motives of all who are immediately concerned in the administration of the system, there can be no kind of question.

Between the body of the prison and the outer wall, there is a spacious garden. Entering it, we ... passed into a large chamber, from which seven long passages radiate. On either side of each, is a long, long row of low cell doors, with a certain number over every one. Above, a gallery of cells like those below, except that they have no narrow yard attached (as those in the ground tier have), and are somewhat smaller. The possession of two of these, is supposed to compensate for the absence of so much air and exercise as can be had in the dull strip attached to each of the others, in an hour's time every day; and therefore every prisoner in this upper story has two cells, adjoining and communicating with, each other.

Standing at the central point, and looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occasionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver's shuttle, or shoemaker's last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife and children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.

Look here the entire text and a more complete description of Philadelphia