An early 20th-century mansion atop a hill in Richmond, Virginia, sits on property once owned by Sarah Elmira Shelton, who was horror fiction writer Edgar Allan Poe’s fiancée (briefly) and may have had a significant impact on his life’s work.
Poe was engaged to Shelton when he was 17. Her father, worried that Poe wasn’t pursuing a proper career, scuttled those plans, and she married a wealthier man, according to the website of The Poe Museum in Richmond. After Shelton’s husband died, Poe and Shelton again made plans to marry, but Poe met his own end before they could wed.
Poe spent his childhood in Richmond as well as his final years, though he wrote many of his most famous poems and stories elsewhere.
'It’s owning a piece of Richmond history'
Though a fire destroyed the house Shelton lived in at 1323 Vinton St. in the Fulton neighborhood, the Compass/Jenny Maraghy Team is emphasizing her ties to the property in its listing. The current six-bedroom house dates to 1910 and is on the market for $575,000.
“It’s owning a piece of Richmond history,” Kristin Scotto, the team’s marketing director, told Homes.com.
The stately brick house stands out on its roughly half-acre lot, surrounded by modest homes built in the 1960s and 1970s. The list price includes the adjacent lot, also about half an acre, which is undeveloped except for a small garage. The sellers, the Crow family, want to keep the properties together and the second lot undeveloped to honor the site’s history, Scotto said. The house has been in their family since 1965.
“The two parcels keep a measure of the estate that preceded the 20th‑century streets — the porch open to the air and the side ground held as a long, green verge,” according to a summary of the property’s history that the Crows shared with Scotto.
The house’s ground floor is notable for its two front rooms, an arrangement Scotto said she learned from a local historian was not unusual in older Richmond houses. Both spaces would have been for entertaining, she said, with the men gathering in one of the rooms and the women in the other. The fireplaces and mantels above them contain elaborate decorative features.
Scotto said she also thinks the house’s large windows, which let in a flood of daylight, are a key selling point.
From 'No more' to 'Nevermore'
A distraught Poe wrote a number of poems about his sense of loss after his initial engagement to Shelton was broken off, according to the Poe Museum. One of these writings contains the refrain “No more,” which the museum suggests foreshadows his use of the phrase “Nevermore” in his famous poem “The Raven,” published in 1845.
Shelton’s time on the property was relatively short. Her husband, Alexander Shelton, purchased it in 1839, according to the Crows’ historical summary. He died in 1844, and Shelton sold the house a year later. It wasn’t until 1847 that she and Poe rekindled their romance, according to the Poe Museum, and they became engaged in 1849.
In late September of that year, Poe, who had been in poor health after a bout of cholera, boarded a ship to Baltimore. He died not long afterward. Shelton called Poe “the dearest object on earth” in a subsequent letter to his aunt, the museum said.
Her 1888 obituary in a Richmond newspaper was headlined “Poe’s First and Last Love.”