E X T E N S I O N THE BALTIMORE POE HOUSE AND MUSEUM The Baltimore Poe House and Museum is located at 203 Amity Street in West Baltimore, where Edgar Allan Poe lived from 1832 to 1835. The little house was probably built in 1830 and rented by his aunt, Maria Clemm. Beside Maria (aged 43) and Edgar (23), the household1 included, Maria s mother (Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, 73), her daughter (Virginia Eliza Clemm, 10) and her son (Henry Clemm, 14). Maria Clemm rented the house with money from her mother s government pension, which was given to her in recognition of her husband s (Major David Poe) prominent2 service during the Revolutionary War. Edgar A. Poe left the house in 1835, when he moved to Richmond, Virginia, to edit the Southern Literary Messenger. Elizabeth Cairnes Poe died more or less at the same time. As her pension stopped, Maria, Edgar Allan s aunt, was soon unable to pay the rent and had to move. Edgar s cousin Neilson Poe, who lived in Baltimore and had married Virginia s half-sister3, offered to take in both Virginia and Maria. Edgar did not want to lose his family, so he wrote a letter to Virginia to propose to4 her. She accepted and she and Maria moved with Poe to Richmond. The house was left and later, in 1841, was saved from demolition by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. It is very likely that MS found in a Bottle was written during his stay in Amity Street, although it is difficult to determine the dates of Poe s compositions, as many were published years later. 1. household: the people who live in a house as a unit. 2. prominent: important and well-known. 3. half-sister: sister with only either the mother or the father in common. 4. propose to: ask somebody to marry you. 22