Text: Anonymous, “Laid by the Poet's Side,” Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD), vol. XCVI, no. 56, January 20, 1885, p. 4, col. 2

[page 4, column 2:]

Yesterday was the seventy-sixth anniververy [[anniversary]] of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. It was made the occasion for the reinterment in Baltimore, by the side of the dead poet, of the remains of his wife, Mrs. Virginia Clemm Poe, who died at Fordham, N. Y., in 1848. These remains were brought to Baltimore from the Dutch Presbyterian churchyard of Fordham by Hon. Luther R. Marsh, president of the park commission, New York, and W. Fearing Gill, Esq., the biographer of Poe. The reinterment took place at 3.30 P. M. in the graveyard of Westminster Church, Fayette and Greene streets. Among those present were the Hon. Luther R. Marsh, who delivered the oration on Shakespeare at the Poe Memorial Festival in the metropolis; Miss Sara S. Rice, who projected the Poe monument erected here in 1875; Prof. Andrew S. Kerr, of the Western Female High School; John P. Poe, Esq, the second cousin of the poet, who superintended the reinterment, and the Rev. J. S. B. Hodges, rector of St. Panl's [[Paul's]] Episcopal Church, who offered the following impressive invocation:

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. We recommit the mortal remains of our departed sister to the ground-earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust-looking for the general resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

“‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; for they rest from their labors.”

“The Lord bless and keep us. The Lord make His face to shine upon us and be gracious unto us. The Lord lift up His countenance upon us and Lord. give us peace, through Jesus Christ our Amen.”

A gentleman who has been recognized as among the foremost of the friends of the poet, and who has been the author of appreciative tributes to his fame, says:

“It has long been the wish of the family and friends of the poet that the remains of his child-wife, Virginia Clemm Poe, (a sister of Mrs. Neilson Poe, of this city,) who died in 1848, should be placed beside those of her husband and of her mother, Maria Clemm, which rest under the Poe monument, in the Westminster Presbyterian churchyard here. The anniversary of the poet's natal day was most appropriately selected as the occasion for the fulfillment of this tribute to his memory. “

”It is a remarkable incident that Mr. Dennis Valentine, the sexton of the Fordham Church, who officiated at the sepulture of Virginia Poe in 1848, should officiating in the same position — deliver her relics to Mr. Gill in person, and that Mr. George W. Spence, who, then a young man of twenty-five years, conducted the burial of Poe in 1849, and afterward his reinterment under the monument in 1875, should also, as the official sexton of the Westminster Church, be called upon to witness the last rites offered to all that remains that is mortal of Poe's wife thirty-six years subsequent to the death of the husband, by whose side her ashes are now laid after that long space of separation.

“It is scarcely less remarkable that Mr. Gill, who was the first writer to correctly discover and locate the time and place of Poe's birth as at Boston, Jan. 19, 1809, should also be conspicuously instrumental in memorializing the first observance of an anniversary of his birth. “It is a most fitting conclusion to the series of tributes that have been paid to the memory of Edgar Allan Poe here in Baltimore, where his literary genius was first acknowledged, that the ashes of his child-wife — his ‘Annabel Lee’ — should have been brought back to rest in her native city beside her husband and his ‘more than mother’ — her mother — and that these three. bound in the closest ties of blood, should in death be at last united, as they were ever-a trinity of souls — in the cruel battle of life, which they bore together for many years as one.

The present year will indeed be a notable one in the annals of the history of Poe. There have already appeared two new editions of his complete works — one in London and one in New York — together with two illustrated editions of his ‘Raven,’ one by Gustave Dore, and in the spring the ‘Memorial,’ a colossal mural tablet, representing Fame crowning a bust of Poe with the laurel, will be placed in the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York as a tribute from the stage to a poet born of actor parents.”