Unburied Treasure: Edgar Allan Poe in the South Carolina Lowcountry

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] While researching his 1885 biography of Edgar Allan Poe for Houghton Mifflin's American Men of betters series, George E. Woodberry discovered that Poe had enlisted in the U. S. Army in 1827 under the name of Edgar Perry. As is now well known, Poe was shipped to Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, a barrier island on Harbor, where he was stationed from November 1827 until December 1828. His company was then transferred to Fortress Monroe in Point Comfort, Virginia, where Poe was promoted to Sergeant Major before arranging a substitute and being discharged in April 1829. Poe had deliberately hidden his Army stint--and along with it, his year on Sullivan's Island--instead fabricating stories of foreign adventure in Greece and Russia to account for these years in biographical sketches that appeared during his lifetime. But suddenly, thirty-six years after Poe's death, South Carolina could, in some small measure, claim him, along with Boston, Richmond, Charlottesville, West Point, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. This essay explores the efforts of and Sullivan's Island to write Poe into their cultural history without the benefit of detailed documentary evidence of his activities there. As Poe's biography began to absorb the year spent on Sullivan's Island, what did it mean for the Carolina Lowcountry to include Poe in its history? What might the city and nearby barrier island have contributed to Poe's imagination? What would it mean to call Poe a Charleston writer? fact that Poe set his 1843 story The Gold-Bug--one of his most celebrated tales, and the one for which he received a much-needed $100 prize--on and around Sullivan's Island should give the small town and nearby bragging rights among Poe places. There is no Poe story with an equivalent emphasis on place set in the American cities where he spent considerably more time. Poe describes the area at some length, referring to Charleston, where the narrator resides, three times in the opening pages. Moreover, the protagonist Legrand's discovery of a treasure buried by Captain Kidd depends on his ability to project clues left by Kidd onto the landscape of the island and the terrain of the wild and desolate mainland nearby. And yet, little in the descriptions would have required an intimate knowledge of the area; Poe describes a typical southeastern barrier island, narrow and sandy with low-lying sweet myrtle and palmetto. Later in the story, Poe conspicuously alters the landscape by placing steep hills on the mainland coast: It was a species of table land, near the summit of an almost inaccessible hill, densely wooded from base to pinnacle, and interspersed with deep crags that appeared to lie loosely upon the soil, and in many cases were prevented from precipitating themselves on the valleys below, merely by support of the trees against which they reclined. Deep ravines, in various directions, gave an air of still sterner solemnity to the scene. (1) While Poe undoubtedly drew upon his memory of Sullivan's Island for The Gold-Bug, after fifteen years, he might not have recalled the island vividly, and didn't need to for the purposes of the story, which required a piece of high ground on which to bury treasure more than it did an accurate description of the island and the marshy terrain between Harbor and what is now the Intracoastal Waterway. There would be no more reason to assume that Poe had firsthand knowledge of Sullivan's Island or than there would be that he had spent time in Paris, the setting for the Dupin mysteries, or the Antarctic, the setting for the conclusion of Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. (2) While few Charlestonians seem to have noticed their newly discovered connection to Poe immediately following Woodberry's discovery in 1885, Poe's broader southern credentials were bolstered around the same time by guidebooks to American literary history, stage melodramas, and ceremonies honoring him on the fiftieth anniversary of his death (1899) and centennial of his birth (1909). …