Poe's Life in Boston

ABEL BOWEN
Federal Street Theatre
Engraving
circa 1825

The Federal Street (or First Boston) Theatre as it more plainly appeared when reconstructed soon after it was destroyed by a dressing room fire that swept through the original structure on February 2, 1798. Three generations of Poes performed on Boston's old and new Federal Street stage: Elizabeth and daughter Eliza Arnold in 1796, Eliza and her husband David Poe, Jr., of Baltimore, from 1806 to 1809, and their son Edgar Allan Poe at an infamous reading before the Boston Lyceum in 1845 (by which time the venue had been renamed the Odeon Theatre). It was destroyed, together with 775 other buildings, in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.

Courtesy of Historic New England