This museum complex serves a dual purpose of preserving Richmond's oldest building and memorializing famous son Edgar Allan Poe. The stone house was reputedly constructed the year Richmond was laid out and is credited to German immigrant Joseph Ege (though some claim it dates from 1754). The cottage is typical of the design and scale of the city's colonial architecture, but the use of granite is unusual for the period. Even though Poe never had any association with the structure, Richmond antiquarians created a memorial to him here in the 1920s, a memorial garden and museum built of bricks from the Southern Literary Messenger building, where Poe worked as an editor.