Local legends get due honors

Did you catch the significant coincidence of events this week?

On the same day, two groups, working independently, memorialized the deaths of two Virginia — and American — legends.

Edgar Allan Poe received a belated full-scale funeral in Baltimore and Meriwether Lewis got a memorial service in Hohenwald, Tenn. Both events occurred on Oct. 7.

The date was nearly 200 years to the day after Lewis died at an inn on the Natchez Trace, the apparent victim of suicide — although some claim it was political assassination. (He died on Oct. 11, 1809.)

Poe’s funeral came 160 years to the day after he died. He had been found delirious on the streets of Baltimore and never was able to say what happened to him. Modern re-evaluation of his symptoms have suggested anything from rabies to meningeal inflammation, although it was long assumed that his decline and demise were linked to alcoholism and his reputation was destroyed posthumously by a literary enemy.

Perhaps these shadows — rumors of alcoholism, madness, suicide — account for the short shrift these two 19th-century giants then received. Poe’s first funeral was a hastily assembled and poorly attended affair. Lewis, buried near the site of his death, was given neither a funeral nor a memorial service at the time.

Both men, of course, had ties to Charlottesville. Poe attended the University of Virginia; Lewis was born not far outside town.

This week’s events should have special significance for local folks.

The events are not the first to seek to rehabilitate the reputations of Lewis and Poe or honor their memories, but they are conspicuous for having fallen on the same day, in a month that saw both their deaths.