Edgar Allan Poe's Room (13 West Range)

He enrolled on February 14, 1826 — seventeen years old, one term, room 13 on the West Range. He took classes in Ancient and Modern Languages. He accumulated debts his foster father refused to pay. He left.

That's most of what the record gives you. The room at 13 West Range — called the Raven Room — preserves what came before the work: before Baltimore, before the death in 1849 wearing clothes that weren't his own, before the obituary that depicted him as a depraved madman and was largely fabricated. A glass door lets you see the period furnishings. Press a button, hear a recording. The Raven Society maintains the room.

The university was new. Jefferson had opened it the year before Poe arrived. The only Virginia-set story Poe ever wrote, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," is set near Charlottesville. Whether the place stayed with him, or he simply needed a landscape he already knew, the brief doesn't say. The room holds no manuscript, no letter. Just the furniture, and the gap it marks.