The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of his Family, Friends and Foes (Book Trailer)

Writer Sarah A. Brock Putnam buried in Hollywood Cemetery (Richmond, Va)

From American Women

 (1893), p. 590.

When I published my research on Women Writers Buried in Virginia, I dedicated the book to the women writers buried in Virginia cemeteries whom I have not yet discovered. 

I’m glad that I keep discovering them. There are twenty-three cemeteries represented in the book. The majority includes one or two women writers buried there with two exceptions—“Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, which has twelve women writers interred, and Arlington National Cemetery, which has five” (15). Make that a lucky 13 for Hollywood Cemetery. 

When reading Mary Tardy’s 1872 The Living Female Writers of the South, I overlooked Miss Sallie A. Brock, who often published under the pseudonym Virginia Madison. Born on March 18. 1831 as Sarah Ann Brock in Madison Court House, Brock went by the name Sallie. She was tutored at home by her father and later by governesses. Her family moved to the University of Virginia where Brock lived for eight years before the family moved to Richmond in 1858 where she devoted her studies to oil-painting and writing. Within a few years, Brock’s dreams of becoming an authoress would be put on hold due to the Civil War. 

After the war, Brock moved to New York to work around other writers. In 1869, her collection of poems from Southern poets, The Southern Amaranth, was published to benefit the Ladies’ Memorial Association, organized groups of southern white women who sought out the bodies of their fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins who were Confederate soldiers who had fallen in war and whose bodies were left in fields and made arrangements for their bodies to be interred in cemeteries. From 1869-1870, Brock traveled Europe where her letters were published. 

Brock wrote editorials, historical articles, essays, biographies, poetry, and a novel. She is best remembered for her memoir, Richmond During the War: Four Years of Personal Observation (1867), which was published “by a Richmond Lady.” Brock even references Hollywood Cemetery within her memoir. Her only published novel, Kenneth, My King (1873) described as “A romance set in the American South patterned after Jane Eyre, about an intelligent young woman who is unmarried and left to fend for herself.” The novel was poorly reviewed but that did not stop me from clicking purchase on a first edition copy that I found online. 

On January 11, 1882, Brock married a minister, Richard Fletcher Putnam who was also a member of the Boston publishing family. They lived in New York and Connecticut. While she continued to contribute to magazines and wrote novels, her focus had changed from writing to family. She attended the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 that was held in Chicago where she participated with other Virginia authors. 

On March 22, 1911, she passed and is buried in Hollywood Cemetery next to her husband who died five years before her. 

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch

 Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1911, p 2.

Works referenced: 

Driggs, Sarah, and Dictionary of Virginia Biography. "Sarah Ann Brock (1831–1911)" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 15 Jun. 2023 

Tardy, Mary. The Living Female Writers of the South. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger, 1872, 404-408.

An Afternoon Tea with Mary Shelley

I attended the Making a Monster: An Afternoon Tea with Mary Shelley at Hunter House Victorian Museum, a house museum that was built in 1894 for James Wilson Hunter and Lizzie Ayer Barnes Hunter and their children. 

 This was the second time that I’ve attended one of their teas. The last time was in January 2018 when they hosted “Walking in a Witchy Wonderland.” This time, I decided to join the museum as a member. The museum is run by women and they have the best programming with many literary in nature. 

The Mary Shelley tea event was listed: 

Discover the blurred lines between medicine and literature at this interactive afternoon tea. Come meet our special guest Mary Shelley and learn about the real-life events that inspired her to make a monster. 

I’ve been trying not to take too many pictures at events since I’m focused on being present, or at least trying to be present but the food was so cute and the actors were talented, informative, and entertaining that I took a few. I loved how the camera played some tricks as the actor playing Percy Bysshe Shelley read from the book. Unfortunately, I was a bit too close to the actor playing Mary Shelley that my camera distorted her a bit. 

I really enjoyed the company of the museum members who were at the table with me. And, while visiting their gift shop, I was thrilled to see so many of the books and merchandise focused on women's history. I thought my Women Writers Buried in Virginia would fit right in. 

Turns out that they have an annual Poe event so this year my forthcoming book The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of His Family, Friends and Foes will fit in as well. 

The tea was all very kismet. 

Hunter House Victorian Museum 

Pollinators Tour at Old City Cemetery (First Virginia Chapter AGS Event!)

2023 Virginia Writers Club Symposium at Randolph-Macon College on August 5

 

I will be presenting at the 2023 Virginia Writers Club Symposium at Randolph-Macon College on August 5! My workshop, "Grave Inspiration: Stories that arise from cemeteries and grave markers" is going to be interactive and FUN!

Pollinators Tour at Old City Cemetery

We're looking forward to the first Virginia Chapter of AGS event -the Pollinators Tour at Old City Cemetery, this Sunday 1 PM – 2:30 PM. We hope you will join us!

Event link

1863 Brown's Island Laboratory Disaster- the graves in Shockoe Hill Cemetery

On May 10, 2023, I attended a history tour at Shockoe Hill Cemetery. I was excited because Bert Dunkerly, a historian, author, and National Park Ranger was the guide and because of the topic—the Brown’s Island Disaster.  

On Friday, March 13, 1863- Friday the 13^th- the Confederate Laboratory, a munitions manufacturing facility on Brown’s Island that produced much of the ammunition for the Confederacy, and which employed about 300 women and girls, exploded. The Richmond Whig reported that “the force of the explosion demolished about fifty feet of the house, the sides being blown out and the roof falling…”[I]

Dunkerly’s tour explicitly focused on the fourteen young girls who were victims of the 1863 explosion who are buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery. This was the first time Dunkerly gave the tour and I was looking forward to hearing their stories. 

 

The Laboratory employed about 300 women and girls. They were working class people hoping to make a dollar to two dollars per day by producing small arms cartridges and artillery ammunition. The location of the disaster was a structure that held a variety of activities, including breaking open cartridges to be reused, and filling new cartridges. As Dunkerly explained, there was loose powder everywhere and these activities should have been done in the same space. 

One teenager, Mary Ryan, an Irish immigrant who “was known for being careless” and had been corrected prior to the disaster, was working with friction primers that were used to ignite the powder charges in ammunition. While Ryan was working with the primers, one became stuck; she banged the wooden block to dislodge it. 

Richmond Whig, March 14, 1863.

Even having been reprimanded in the past, how could a teenager possibly grasp the severity of the situation. One can imagine how little training these young girls must have had and how the safety regulations were so different from today. Ryan’s banging set off a spark that ignited the gun powder in the room. The explosion devastated the structure and ten of the workers were killed instantly, including Alice Johnson and Mary Zerhum, both just 12 years old, and Wilhelmina Defenbach, 15, who also died immediately after the explosion. 

I grew up about twenty miles from Brown’s Island but the explosion wasn’t something that I was taught in school. I don’t recall learning anything about it until adulthood perhaps because it involved many young women including those as young as 10 and they were mostly German and Irish immigrants. The tour was held nearly 160 years and two months after one of the worst manufacturing accidents of the Civil War in the South and unfortunately, it was poorly attended. I point this out for a reason that I will explain later.

Emma Blankenship, 15

 

Alice Johnson, 12

Blankenship, Richmond Dispatch, March 20, 1863

Dunkerly’s tour explicitly focused on the fourteen young girls who were victims of the 1863 explosion who are buried in Shockoe Hill Cemetery. This was the first time Dunkerly gave the tour and I was looking forward to hearing their stories. 

 

The Laboratory employed about 300 women and girls. They were working class people hoping to make a dollar to two dollars per day by producing small arms cartridges and artillery ammunition. The location of the disaster was a structure that held a variety of activities, including breaking open cartridges to be reused, and filling new cartridges. As Dunkerly explained, there was loose powder everywhere and these activities should have been done in the same space. 

 

One teenager, Mary Ryan, an Irish immigrant who “was known for being careless” and had been corrected prior to the disaster, was working with friction primers that were used to ignite the powder charges in ammunition. While Ryan was working with the primers, one became stuck; she banged the wooden block to dislodge

it. 

Virginia C. Page, 13

Richmonders rushed to the scene only to be met by victims who were seriously wounded from burns, lacerations, and blunt force trauma. The wounded were taken to General Hospital #2 that had been the former tobacco factory of S. W. Bailey and Company. 

I can only imagine how overwhelmed the families must have felt. And while there were advertisements in the newspapers and Richmonders donated funds to help with the costs of the injured, burials began immediately with several of the victims being interred on the same day.  

 Mary Zerhum, 12

Virginia Page, Richmond Dispatch, March 16, 1863.

     

                                  

Mary Valentine, 14, and Margaret Drustly, 16

Martha Clemmons, 25, and Margaret Alexander, 14

Virginia Mayer, 12, and Wilhelmina Defenbach, 15

Caroline Zietenheimer, 16

 

 

Nannie Horan, 14

My photos of the graves of Mary Ellen Wallace, 12 and Anne E. Bolton, 14 did not turn out but I plan to return to visit these girls .

One poignant moment of the tour was when Dunkerly shared how with so many war-related memories happening, this disaster did not continue to make the newspapers. His research could not find mention of the first or tenth anniversaries being recognized with wreath-laying ceremonies or even tributes in the paper. With so many lives affected by the explosion, it's unlikely the tragedy was forgotten by those close to the victims. A low tour turnout reinforced the message of these girls being forgotten. I'm so appreciative of researchers like Dunkerly and the Friends of Shockoe Hill Cemetery for working to keep their stories alive. 

---

[i] “Terrible Explosion at the Government Laboratory,” The Richmond Whig, Sat March 14, 1863, 1. 

Our first Virginia Chapter of AGS event!

Pollinators Tour at Old City Cemetery (First Virginia Chapter AGS Event!)

Old City Cemetery Museums and ArboretumSUNDAY May 21 - 1 PM – 2:30 PM

I wrote another book!

My forthcoming book, The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of His Family, Friends and Foes is being published by The History Press on August 21, 2023. Some of the cemeteries that I visited were places Poe visited. For some of the cemeteries in this collection, Poe would recognize only the names on the graves, not the place itself. And for other cemeteries, Poe would recognize the names and be familiar with the land—although prior to it being established as a burial ground. I love the idea of standing where the author once stood and walking the paths he once walked. I enjoy physically being in a place associated with history—where authors walked and lived. To have a fuller story of Poe and the people with whom he associated, I went to cemeteries and visited graves of his mother, wife, foster family, first and last fiancée, bosses, friends, cousins, school peers and instructors. I hope that my book encourages readers of Poe to visit the cemeteries in the collection to create their own experiences with those connected to the famous author. I focused on cemeteries in the South including those mostly in Virginia and Maryland, along with Washington, D.C.; Kentucky; South Carolina; and West Virginia. 

The book isn't up on their website yet but it's being shown on Bookshop.org. I'll add a link below: 

Description:
Journey to the burial places of the people who lived in Poe's world. 
Edgar Allan Poe considered himself a Virginian. Credited with originating the modern detective story, developing Gothic horror tales, and writing the precursor to science fiction, Poe worked to elevate Southern literature. He lived in the South most of his life, died in Baltimore and made his final home in Richmond. His family and many of his closest associates were southerners. Visit the graves of the people with whom he worked and socialized, who he loved and at times loathed and gain a fuller understanding of Poe's life. These were individuals who supported, inspired, and challenged him, and even a few who attempted to foil his plans. Professor and cemetery historian Sharon Pajka tells their stories.