Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 June 1896 — POE COTTAGE AT FORDHAM. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

POE COTTAGE AT FORDHAM.

Plan to Preserve the Poet's Last Residence. Just fifty years ago. In cherry blossom time, 1846, Edgar Allen Poe, a half-mad genius, of whom little else was known except that he was poor, moved from Amity street. New York, to the suburban! village of Fordham, on the Kingsbridge road. Although at best but a mean dwelling, the cottage was the pleasantest retreat he had ever known. It was a one and a half story shingled Dutch house, containing three rooms and a sleeping closet. A sit-ting-room was on one side of the little hall and a kitchen on the other. The furniture was of the simplest. In the other, which was laid with straw matting, were only a light stand with presentation volumes, some banging bookshelves and four chairs—absolutely nothing else. Above was Poe’s room—a low, pquare, cramped chamber, lighted by two windows, like portholes, and furpished with a deal table and chair and the fanciful portrait of the "loved pnd lost Leonore.” Adjoining this was the sleeping closet, where the child wife, Virginia, drew her difficult and failing breath, within sound of the pen that wrote immortal tales and poems and could not win bread for her. So bare and dwarfed within, the occupants were driven without, where there was a fine spaciousness of view. A picket fence separated the yard from the street, and further privacy was afforded by the hoodllke porch and the presentation of the gable end of

the house to the highway. Cherry trees embowered the bumble cottage. The granite of the underlying rock cropped through the grass, and a stone’s throw east of the porch, then as now overgrown with vines, rose tho ledge itself, overhung by sighing pines. And looking far off, across the meadows, woods and villages and Harlem bridge, a glimmer of ocean lay on the horizon. The cottage Is still there, at the top of Fordham Hill, almost at the extreme limit of northern New York City. The cherry trees, whose balmy blossoms so soothed the sore lungs of poor Virginia, are gone. Neighboring and pretentious houses crowd and dwarf the quaint Cottage, tho sighing pines and the rocky ledge have made way for streetsi,and| buildings, and the glimpse of .ocean no longer rims the eastern horizon. But thousands have climbed the winding stajr to see the room where "The Bells," “An nabel and "Eleanora” were written. Au American shrine, where shines are few, annually visited by more pilgrims, it seemed incredible that it should ever be disturbed! Only last year, by reason of the widening of the street, its demolition was threatened. Now a bill is to be presented to the State Legislature by the Shakspeare Society of New York to enable the association to purchase and preserve the place where Poe spent the last four years of his unhappy life. It la proposed to refurnish the cottage as nearly like the original as may be, leaving the tiny windows, uncurtained, replant cherry trees and trim the vines, hang bird cages in tlje [•ortico and procure a cat as nearly ike the beloved “Catarina” that warmed the bosom of the dying Virginian as possible—Just poverty and piles of manuscripts! It will not be difficult then to imagine the playful, witty, affectionate; alternately docile and wayward genius; the gentle, fragile wife ftnd the adoring mother—large featured, capable, bepevolent Mrs. Clem, that made up that curious household.

THE EDGAR ALLAN POE COTTAGS.