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Poe's Scottish Connections
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Searching For Poe In Scotland
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The James Poe house in Ardrossan, where this contemporary cousin of Edgar Allan Poe lived and became Harbour Master. The information is courtesy of Mrs. Sharon Smith, local genealogist, whose father lived in the house at the time of our visit. We provide the address in our book.
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After we made our first visit to the old Saltcoats Kirk in winter of 1998, now a local museum, and told Mr. Strachan why that we had made the journey from California, he quickly went to his plot index, and found the coordinates of the cemetery burial sites. Within seconds he found the listing of the Poe and Allan headstone.
As with all photographs of Brill and our subjects, this picture of Mr. Mark Strachan, Senior Museum Assistant, of the North Ayrshire Council, was taken by Grace Kenmotsu just after the Poe-Allan gravestone was located and cleaned of years of debris.
From the date of this visit to our next, a year later, Mr. Strachan had the stone repaired and inspected by a local stonemason, and removed to inside of the Museum, "...kindly for free, by our local monumental mason Barry McManus."
The stone is now on permanent display, with a wonderful collage of factual details of Edgar Allan Poe's life and relatives in and about Ayrshire. Mr. Strachan has reported that many visitors and local scholars have since been attracted to the museum by placement of the Poe-Allan headstone exhibit.
The American Family of Poes initially rebuffed my information and findings, but have since added John McInnus' article, "The Tell-Tell Tomb, Wit and Wisdom," onto a web page when one conducts a search of information of Poe's Scottish Connections, without providing our efforts any credit
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Dick and Cathy Garvey are proprietors of the Graystone Bed and Breakfast (B&B) on the crescent of Ardrossan. Except for being wonderful hosts to us while we made our visits to the Saltcoats, Ayrshire Museum, and surrounding towns, including the Isle of Arran, there was no apparent connection of their B&B to Poe in Scotland.
On our fourth and final stay during five years of visits at the Graystone, we were put up in their third floor bedroom. That evening Brill made the observation of the map seen behind Grace and the Garveys of several Ayrshire place-names on a map of Scotland written in Gaelic. They were the same as those Poe had used in his fiction. From that discovery, we went on to pinpoint the place in Ayrshire from which Poe ancestors had departed in 1742 from Fenwick Parish for the British Colony in Pennsylvania.
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Seen at the Poe-Allan gravestone exhibit inside the Saltcoats Museum is the person most responsible for having the stone moved there, Mr. Mark Strachan, Senior Museum Assistant. Also in the photograph with Brill is Ardrossan Local History Society president and writer of many local history books, Mrs. McSherry.
Saltcoats is the ancient North Ayrshire seaport to which John Allan's cousin, Alexander (Sandy) Allan, moved from Irvine and began the Allan Line of Shipping that employed other Allans, Galts, and Poes over the Nineteenth Century.
Alexander Allan married into the Poe family here, and it was his daughter, Anne, who married another Poe. Alexander posted that Poe son-in-law to the Allan Line of Shipping headquarters in Canada, as Chief Administrator, and where they remained. As seen in the above photograph, another Poe, James, became the Harbor Master of Saltcoats-Ardrossan, until retiring in early Twentieth Century.
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