One hundred and sixty-eight bleak Decembers ago or thereabouts, Edgar Allan Poe sat before a fireplace in a farmhouse on a high bluff on what would someday be called the Upper West Side, composing a poem. The fireplace, encased by a wooden mantel carved with vines and fruit, found its way into the poem: the place from which “each separate dying ember / Wrought its ghost upon the floor.”
It then made its way to Columbia University much later. Then, it went into obscurity. Then it's been rediscovered.
From a piece in the New York Times...
The Raven Mantel has had a less conspicuous history.
Poe’s quarters on the second floor of the Brennan farmhouse were small but comfortable, with windows that looked out past ponds and hills and forests toward the Hudson. The house became a place of pilgrimage in the decades after Poe’s death, and on his visit in 1888, Hemstreet, a retired Civil War colonel and board member of the Brooklyn art museum, regarded the Raven Room, as it was called, “with profound sentiment.” But he had to decide quickly what to salvage.
Though the chamber door plays a leading role in the poem, Mr. Hemstreet noted that there were only seven inches from the top of the door to the ceiling – leaving no room for a pallid bust of Pallas, much less a lordly raven perched atop it – and ruled it out.
Instead, he handed the contractor $5, pried the mantel off the wall with a crowbar, and had it shipped to his home at 1332 Bergen Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and installed around his own hearth.
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