Text: Marning Cline, “Poe and Mount Tom,” New York Herald (New York, NY), vol. LXXXVI, no. 313, July 9, 1922, p. 26, col. 5

[page 26, col. 5, continued:]

TO THE NEW YORK HERALD: Dr. Morgan's surmises as to Poe and Mount Tom are obviously correct.

I cannot state, of course, the condition of Mount Tom in 1844-45, which was before I was born, but I know that in the early ‘60s all the east bank of the Hudson from above Thirtieth street to Spuyten Duyvil was densely wooded.

It is entirely within my memory that entering the city by the Hudson River Railroad at one's left hand one saw nothing but woods — no signs of habitation except as we approached Thirtieth street.

Until in or about 1882 the city laid out the Riverside Drive I suppose nobody knew or suspected that there was any Mount Tom. That knoll or bowlder, as Dr. Morgan calls it, was, of course, then as now, as bald as a billiard ball. No vegetation could spring out of sheer corrugated rock. But it could easily be concealed by the heavy forest growth.

The present foot of Eighty-fourth street is very near Mount Tom, and if the Brennen mansion, where Poe lived, was removed to make room for Eighty-fourth street it must have been very near Mount Tom if it was on the river bank, though Mount Tom would not have been visible from the mansion itself at all.

MARNING CLINE.

NEW YORK, July 8.