Edgar Allan Poe lived in South Carolina for thirteen months, from November 1827 to December 1828, as an enlisted soldier at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. He was eighteen, broke, estranged from his foster father, and serving under a false name. Fifteen years later he set “The Gold-Bug” on that island, and it became the best-selling story of his lifetime. This page covers what happened, what he took from the Lowcountry, and what’s still there to see.
Why was Edgar Allan Poe in South Carolina?
Because he had nowhere else to go. In the spring of 1827 Poe left the University of Virginia after one term, deep in gambling debt that his foster father, John Allan, refused to cover. He went to Boston, published a pamphlet of poems nobody bought, and on May 26, 1827, enlisted in the United States Army as a private. He gave his name as Edgar A. Perry and his age as twenty-two. He was eighteen.
His unit, Battery H of the First Artillery, was transferred that November to Fort Moultrie, the brick fort on the southwestern tip of Sullivan’s Island guarding the mouth of Charleston Harbor. Poe arrived by ship in November 1827 and stayed until the battery was moved to Fortress Monroe in Virginia in December 1828. He was a good soldier, as it happens. He was promoted to artificer, the enlisted man responsible for preparing shells, and then to sergeant major, the highest rank a non-commissioned officer could hold, in under two years. He was good at keeping records and good at keeping his head down.
What was Sullivan’s Island like in 1828?
Not what it is now. Today it’s one of the most expensive zip codes in the state. In Poe’s year it was a sand spit three miles long, a few hundred yards wide at its widest, covered in myrtle thickets and sea oats, with the fort at one end and a scattering of summer houses belonging to Charleston families who came over by boat to escape the fever season. No bridge. No causeway. A garrison of bored artillerymen, the roar of the surf, and across the marsh to the north, the dark line of the mainland.
Poe described the island in the opening pages of “The Gold-Bug” more precisely than any travel writer of his time: the sand, the scrub, the myrtle, the marsh, the heat. He had walked every foot of it. The story’s narrator notes that the island’s vegetation is sparse and no tree of any size grows there except at its western end, and that detail is accurate to the 1820s.
Where is “The Gold-Bug” set?
On Sullivan’s Island and the mainland across from it. “The Gold-Bug,” published in 1843 in the Dollar Newspaper of Philadelphia, is the story of William Legrand, a ruined Huguenot gentleman from New Orleans living in a hut on the island with his servant Jupiter, who finds a gold-colored beetle, deciphers a coded message written in invisible ink on a scrap of parchment, and digs up Captain Kidd’s treasure beneath a tulip tree on the mainland.
It won Poe a hundred-dollar prize, which was more than he made from most of his work combined, and it was reprinted so often that it became, in his lifetime, his most popular story. It’s also the first great American work of cryptography fiction; the substitution cipher Legrand cracks is real and solvable, and generations of readers have worked it out on their own.
Is the tulip tree in The Gold-Bug a real place?
No specific tree has ever been identified, and Poe moved the mainland landscape around freely. But the geography is Lowcountry geography: Legrand and the narrator cross to the mainland by skiff, pass through marsh and high ground, and climb toward a hill in dense woods. That is the Charleston Neck and the land beyond it, where the pine flats and swamp begin. It is, in other words, the country that runs upriver into Dorchester County.
Did the Lowcountry shape Poe’s Gothic imagination?
Here is where guides tend to overreach, so we’ll be careful. There is no evidence that “The Fall of the House of Usher” was set in South Carolina, and Poe never said so. Usher’s tarn and bleak walls are European Gothic furniture. What the Lowcountry gave Poe is subtler and probably more important.
First, it gave him the only sustained experience of wild landscape in his life. Poe was a city writer, raised in Richmond and Baltimore and London, and his year on Sullivan’s Island is the one stretch where he lived with the sea, the marsh and the swamp at his door. The precision of “The Gold-Bug”‘s setting is the precision of memory.
Second, it gave him the South as a place of buried things. “The Gold-Bug” is about treasure, but its real subject is a secret in the ground that the land has kept for a century, a coded message that has to be read in the right light, and a ruined gentleman whose fortune and sanity depend on digging it up. That is the Southern Gothic plot a hundred years before the genre had a name. Faulkner’s buried pasts, O’Connor’s buried grace, the family secret in the chimney: Poe found the shape of it on a sandbar in Charleston Harbor.
Third, two other stories touch the Lowcountry directly. “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844), the fake news story that fooled New York for a day, lands its transatlantic balloon on Sullivan’s Island, near Fort Moultrie. And “The Oblong Box” (1844), a story about a man traveling with a coffin disguised as a crate, begins aboard a ship sailing out of Charleston. Poe kept going back to the harbor in his mind.
What can you visit today?
- Fort Moultrie (1214 Middle Street, Sullivan’s Island). Part of Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park. The fort Poe served in was rebuilt and modified over the following century, but the site, the walls and the view across the harbor are the same. The park’s exhibits mention his service.
- The Edgar Allan Poe Library (1921 I’On Avenue). The Sullivan’s Island branch of the Charleston County library system is housed in Battery Gadsden, a 1906 coastal gun emplacement, and named for the island’s most famous private. It’s small, half-buried in sand, and exactly as strange as it sounds.
- Poe’s Tavern (2210 Middle Street). A restaurant, not a historic site, but it has been the island’s Poe shrine for years, and it’s where you’ll end up anyway.
- Gold Bug Avenue and Raven Drive. The island named its streets for him. Walk them at dusk, when the myrtle smells the way it did in 1828.
Sullivan’s Island is about an hour and a quarter from St. George down I-26 and across the Cooper River. If you’re building a Lowcountry Gothic day around it, our haunted places near Charleston page covers what else is within reach, and why Charleston is called the most haunted city in America explains what Poe’s harbor has become.
Why Poe matters to County Line Confidential
Poe is the hinge between the European Gothic and the Southern one, as we lay out in Southern Gothic vs. Traditional Gothic. He was raised in the South, trained on the European tradition, and the one time he set a story in Southern soil it was about something buried that had to be read correctly to be found. That is the method of every dispatch on this site: a real place, a real history, and one thing in the ground that the county has been keeping.
If you came here for Poe and want to see what his method looks like upriver, start with Sherman’s Last Letter, which is, when you strip it down, a coded message in a wall and a man who has to decide whether to read it. He’d have recognized it. Then read Almost Here, the first dispatch, and go forward from there.
Sources and further reading
- Poe’s Army service records (enlisted as Edgar A. Perry, May 1827; Battery H, 1st Artillery; Fort Moultrie Nov. 1827 to Dec. 1828) are summarized in Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941) and Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (1991).
- “The Gold-Bug,” full text at Project Gutenberg.
- Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park, National Park Service.