No graves today... almost...

For our last morning in Richmond, we made our way down Monument Avenue to visit the Poe Museum. As it turns out, the building housing the Poe Museum is attached to the Old Stone House, which purports to be the oldest existing home in Richmond, built in 1754. Poe never lived there, but he most likely visited as a boy. Every home Poe did inhabit while he grew-up in Richmond has long since been demolished, although parts of one of his boyhood homes are on display in the museum (his boyhood bed, some bricks from his office downtown, etc).

The museum was just OK. There were a few decent exhibits, and some of Poe's original writing is on display. However, a substantial portion of the museum and central garden (pictured here) were under renovation, meaning many things were inaccessible out of what was, in total, a fairly small collection.

Neither D or I realized how important a writer Poe was in American literary history, however, and the museum did a good job of painting that picture. Considering that he died relatively young, he produced a great deal of innovative work starting at an early age. We both left the museum resolving to read more Poe. It's also been interesting to see -- over the course of this trip, and our own lives in places like NYC and Philadelphia -- how many places in the US have a claim to Poe based on where he lived and worked (he was even stationed at Fort Moultrie for a bit).

After the museum, we needed to get on the road for Philadelphia, but before we did -- and seeing as how we were already in the Shockoe Slip neighborhood, at the base of Church Hill (which you'll recall we climbed yesterday) -- we decided to locate one more spot. Browsing the web while writing last night's blog entry, I'd learned about a train tunnel that used to run through Church Hill, built in the early 1870s. Part of the tunnel collapsed during rehabilitation work in 1925, burying a train and several day workers inside. Successive efforts to the rescue or salvage the bodies and the train resulted in further cave-ins, so the tunnel was sealed-off in 1926. In 2006, some exploratory efforts were made to locate the train and determine the feasibility of recovering the train and missing bodies; the issue remains unresolved. We did manage to find the sealed tunnel entrance, although this photo (taken with my mobile phone, as I forgot our camera in the car) isn't great. If it were better, you'd see that the only thing written on the sealed entrance is "1926". A better photo is available here.

It's spooky to think that Church Hill, while crowned with the church cemetery we visited yesterday, is also the unintentional internment site for those day workers. Nowadays, no company could just "lose" a few workers in a tunnel collapse and decide to seal it off, rather than excavate until the bodies were found. At the very least, there'd be lots of ongoing media attention.

And with that... it was off the Philadelphia. The drive was boring, as we'd expected, although Sheila's decision to take us straight through DC (rather than around the Beltway) meant we got a half-decent view of some our capital's monuments while we sat in traffic.

We got to Philadelphia (and a great home cooked meal) around 7:30 PM. Tomorrow, we're off to Boston. Amazingly, and with very mixed feelings, our trip is just about at an end.