College 'Lit' First to Recognize Poe

Franklin Society of Jefferson Made Him Honorary Member

By Ross Wells

This eighty-sixth anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe is marked in Richmond by announcement of the discovery of the poet's autograph clipped from an unknown letter which reveals that a small college in Western Pennsylvania was the first such institution to officially recognize the genius of the tragedy-marked author.

Dr. Celestin P. Cambiaire, Ph. D., Officier d'Academie, and author of "The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France" as well as six other volumes, who is now affiliated with the Washington and Jefferson College is authority for the announcement.

A few days ago Dr. Cambiaire was informed that Dr. Maurice E. Wilson, 80-year-old chaplain of the college had an autograph of Poe. Inquiry revealed, he says, that Dr. Wilson recalled securing the following authograph:

Most respy
Gentlemen,
Your Obt. St.
Edgar A. Poe

"It was in 1869 when Jefferson College was moved from Canonsburg, Pa., to Washington, Pa., to be united to Washington College," Dr. Cambiaire reports Dr. Wilson as reminiscing, that a few other boys and myself, then 14 years old, found among some old papers a letter from Poe thanking the Franklin Literary Society of Jefferson College for having elected him an honorary member.

"I cut off Poe's signature, put it in my collection of autographs and failing to recognize the value of the letter, discarded it. It must have been written between 1846 and 1849."

Dr. Cambiaire began at once to look into the old documents, manuscripts and letters kept in the museum of Washington and Jefferson College and, after a search lasting several days discovered in an old note book containing handwritten minutes of the Franklin Literary Society of Jefferson College the following statement:

"No. 1556                               Sept. 9th, 1836

E. A. Poe (was elected) Honorary Member. Nourse, Semple & Thompson Sr., com."

The text immediately preceding these words shows clearly that "com." stands for committee appointed to inform Poe of his election, avers Dr. Cambiaire. Thus the autograph in the collection of Dr. Wilson is evidently the last part of the letter Poe wrote to the society thanking them for the honor conferred upon him.

In this manner, when Poe was only 27 years of age and not then so widely known, Jefferson College honored him officially and it may be said that it was probably the first college to officially recognize Poe's genius.

Poem to Mark Tomb of Mother

By J. H. Whitty

Edgar Allan Poe has been dead 86 years. He sleeps peacefully beside his beloved "Virginia," dear "Muddy," and among his other kin in the Westminister churchyard at Baltimore, Md.

The old sexton of that graveyard, who dwelt down among the tombs under the old church, told that he often communed with the spirit of Poe, walking about there in the dead of the night. Poe in his lifetime has related, perhaps, with some poetic license, how he kept vigils during his youth in Richmond, at Shockoe Cemetery, beside the grave of his idealized love. "Helen," pleased to see the present monument over his mothers grave at St. John's erected through the efforts of Samuel P. Cowarden Jr. It is not generally known that arrangements to mark Mrs. Poe's grave at St. John's were under way when the War Between the States broke out, which ended the project. A woman's organization existed in Richmond, at that period, sponsoring the memorial plans. They had commissioned Colonel Will Henry Thompson, author of "High Tide at Gettysburg," and a brother of Maurice Thompson, the author to prepare a proper wording for a tablet. This was found at the time of Thompson's death in Seattle, in August 1918, and is now with his brother, Oscar Thompson. It reads:

MOTHER OF POE

Tablet to Mark the Grave of The Mother of Edgar Allan Poe:

Mother of Edgar, sleeping here,
Listen and bid your dust rejoice,
Who drained your heart of its last tear
To give us an immortal voice.

Only the Prince of Sacrifice,
Who crucified his soul for men,
Can measure the great price of this,
That none may live to give again.

Mother of Edgar, whither sails
The galleon with its glory gone?
What prayer of prophecy avails
The soul that parts with such a son?

But while me mourne the seeming wrong
That loosed him from a mother's hand,
Aloft above our throne of song
His alabaster Memnons stand.

Mother of Edgar, God is good;
To your low place the great will come,
And guide the sobbing multitude
That bears the dust of Edgar home.

While o're your folded hands and eyes
The world's applauding thunders roll,
As on its vanished vision rise
The song built illusions of the soul.

Long-Lost Poe Portrait Reported Found

Also on this anniversary comes the news of an alleged new portrait of the poet from the brush of either Thomas or Robert Sully found in a Tuskaloosa, Ala., garret by Mrs. J. J. Mayfield. The Poe Shrine board of directors has evinced interest in the find but does not feel that the portrait has been sufficiently authenticated as yet for official cognizance to be taken.

Mrs. Mayfield says the canvas is now on exhibit in the Rockefeller Plaza, New York. Experts, she claims, in the persons of Mr. Erich of the Erich-Newhouse Galleries and Herbert Tchudy of the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences, are divided as to crediting the painting to the elder Sully or to his nephew.

The discoverer of the painting relates that she was rummaging through the attic of a distant relative's home in the Southern State when she found the picture behind a broken washstand. It was so caked with dust as to be unrecognizable until a restorer began to clean it. She says she was astonished to find it an oil portrait of Poe that had been given to her cousin's great-great-grandmother, who was a Miss Burwell of Virginia.

Poe's biographers assert, according to Mrs. Mayfield, that Thomas Sully did a portrait of Poe which afterwards disappeared. Robert Sully is said to have described it as "a miniature portrait of the poet," and Edward Valentine, an authority on Poe, is said to have declared that he knew of such a painting but believed it had been destroyed by fire.

Hervey Allen, another biographer of Poe, states that while he had knowledge of such a portrait by Sully, he was not able to divulge his information due to conditions of secrecy imposed upon him.

Whether the portrait Mrs. Mayfield has discovered is the lost painting of Poe by Thomas Sully which has been sought for so many years, or whether it is a picture done by the poet's young friend, Robert Sully, is a controversial matter.

Fragment of article in same newspaper:

Mrs. Stanard, the mother of his school companion.

And in his walks about Richmond, during his last days, prior to his tragic death at Baltimore, October 7, 1849, Poe wandered about old St. John's Cemetery, where the grave of his own mother was well known to him. He was quite young when they laid her away there in 1811, but in after years he often went there with Mrs. Green, the actress, who took the part of the "Bleeding Nun," the night of the disastrous fire in the Richmond Theatre. Mrs. Green lost her daughter in that fire, and became demented in a manner. She continued to live, however, with Mrs. Phillips, in the little house on lower Main Street alongside the Old Indian Queen Hotel, both still standing where Poe's mother died, and most likely she now lives at St. John's, not far from Mrs. Poe's grave.

If aware of mundane doings Poe must be

[Note: We have been unable to locate the remainder of this article.]