EarlyAmericanCeramics.com: Edgar Allen Poe's Stoneware at the Museum of Cape Fear Historical Complex in Fayetteville, North Carolina

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Edgar Allen Poe's Stoneware at the Museum of Cape Fear Historical Complex in Fayetteville, North Carolina

According to the Fayetteville Observer in Fayetteville, North Carolina, "Mention the name Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), and only one man comes to mind: the poet and mystery writer who has frightened generations and given the cheesy horror movie industry unending fodder.

But, as people who have studied Fayetteville history know, there is another Poe, Edgar Allen Poe (1858-1934), one who spelled his middle name with an “e” not an “a”. That Poe was a businessman who built a successful brick and pottery operation at the bottom of Haymount Hill, a family man and teetotaler who helped pull the city out of the depths of post-Civil War misery.

As far as anyone knows, Poe claimed no kinship to the troubled Baltimore writer. But, since Fayetteville’s Poe was born in 1858, nearly a decade after the more famous Poe passed, his parents surely must have known that they were subjecting their child to a pit and a pendulum’s amount of teasing.

“We’ve never been able to determine any relationship between them,” said Megan Maxwell, the education coordinator at Fayetteville’s 1897 Poe House. The house, built by Poe, is now a living museum at the top of Haymount Hill. “And we’re unable to find anyone with the name Edgar in the family before him.

“The best we can determine is that they must have liked the writings of the other Poe. In fact, Lilly Poe, who was the last family member to live in this house, actually has a collection of Poe’s poems in a book.”

While traveling south last month with my nephew Jason to see a Thomas Chandler pottery exhibit at the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, we stopped in Fayetteville, and viewed a collection of pottery made by Edgar Allen Poe at the Museum of Cape Fear Historical Complex in Fayetteville. I enjoyed seeing these objects, which were displayed throughout the museum along with some folk pottery made in North Carolina.

Most of the objects made by Poe were impressed "E.A. Poe," while others were marked "Poe & Co." Interestingly, we visited a few antique shops afterwards in downtown Fayetteville, where we saw an unmarked stoneware pan, which matched the form of a pan in the museum's collection that was marked by Poe.

The Poes