Linden Row Inn

A row of Greek Revival townhouses built in the 1840s, now converted to a boutique hotel. Edgar Allan Poe courted his childhood sweetheart Elmira in the enchanted garden here.

The Linden Row Inn occupies seven stately Greek Revival townhouses that stand as the nation's finest surviving example of their architectural style. Before the red brick facades rose along Franklin Street, this land held an enchanted garden that would inspire one of America's greatest poets and harbor mysteries that endure to this day.

The story begins with Charles Ellis, who purchased the property in 1816 and cultivated a formal garden renowned for its roses, jasmine, and the linden trees that would give the row its name. "In Poe's time, the whole block was a big garden surrounded by a brick wall, and everybody in the neighborhood would hang out there," explains Chris Semtner, curator at the Poe Museum. "It was filled with linden trees and roses. They say you could smell the roses from a block away." It was here that a young Edgar Allan Poe, living across the street with his adoptive parents John and Frances Allan at the Ellis home, played among the fragrant blooms with the Ellis children. More significantly, it was in this garden that teenage Poe first courted Sarah Elmira Royster, his "life-long love." The garden would later be immortalized in his 1848 poem "To Helen," with its evocative lines about "a thousand Roses that grew in an enchanted garden, Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe."

Fleming James, a business partner of Ellis, purchased the land in 1839 and commissioned architect Otis Manson to design a row of townhouses. The eastern five houses, known as Linden Square, were completed in 1847. Samuel and Alexander Rutherfoord added five more matching houses in 1853, creating a unified block of Greek Revival elegance with fluted Doric columns, English basements, and twelve-foot ceilings. Originally containing ten houses, two were demolished in 1922 for an office building.

The townhouses quickly became a sought-after address, housing families, schools, and businesses. Three prestigious girls' schools operated from Linden Row. D. Lee Powell's Southern Female Institute occupied the two westernmost houses from 1853 to 1865, teaching young women French with two Parisian instructors in residence. From 1856 to 1866, Mrs. Virginia Johnson Pegram ran her school at 106-108 Franklin Street. Mrs. Pegram had been widowed when her husband James West Pegram, a prominent attorney and bank president, was killed in a steamboat explosion on the Ohio River in 1844. She opened the school to support her five children, including future Confederate generals John Pegram and William "Willie" Pegram—both of whom would die in battle in 1865, just weeks apart. John was killed at Hatcher's Run on February 6, three weeks after his wedding to Hetty Cary; Willie fell mortally wounded at Five Forks on April 2.

After the Civil War, Miss Virginia Randolph Ellett established her school at Linden Row from 1895 to 1906. Among her pupils were the famous Langhorne sisters: Irene, who became the "Gibson Girl" as the wife of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, and Nancy, who would become Lady Nancy Astor, the first female member of the British Parliament. In one of the townhouses lived novelist Mary Johnston, author of the 1900 bestseller "To Have and to Hold" and the feminist novel "Hagar." Johnston, a prominent suffragist, published "Lewis Rand" while residing at Linden Row before her death in 1936.

The property's connection to slavery is marked by the former slave dwellings that still stand behind the main structures—a reminder of the antebellum society that shaped Richmond before the Civil War.

The most persistent ghost story involves Elizabeth Poe, Edgar's mother, a traveling actress who died of consumption in Richmond in December 1811, orphaning her two-year-old son. Legend claims her spirit roams the buildings searching room to room for the children she left behind. Hotel guests have reported seeing the apparition of a woman in period dress wandering the halls. However, Vishal Savani, director of the Linden Row Inn, has debunked this tale: "One of the ghost stories out there—that is false—is that his mother Eliza Poe's ghost roams the buildings. The story is her ghost is here because she stayed in one of the townhouses, but these buildings hadn't been built in Eliza Poe's lifetime. Edgar hadn't even played in the gardens that were here until after her death."

Yet the hauntings persist, even if their source remains mysterious. A staff member has admitted: "There is one room that gives me an eerie feeling whenever I go in." According to reports, "anyone who checks in there... they usually leave right quick." The hotel brought in paranormal investigators years ago who "did pick up something" in the dining room—a space converted from the original stables. Guests have reported alarm clocks going off when no one had set them, unexplained noises in empty hallways, and an overall eerie feeling in certain rooms.

With its enormous rooms, winding staircases that "list charmingly toward the banisters," and antique furnishings from the 1800s, the inn has the atmosphere of a place where, as one visitor wrote, "you can easily imagine encountering a spectral vision in crinoline in an upstairs hallway or floating on the long, romantic veranda on a moonless night." The property is featured on the Phantoms of Franklin Ghost Tour, where guides share the haunted tales that have accumulated over nearly two centuries.

Preservationist Mary Wingfield Scott saved the remaining eight houses from demolition between 1950 and 1957, donating them to the Historic Richmond Foundation in 1980. The property was lovingly restored and opened as the Linden Row Inn in 1988. Today, the same linden trees that shaded Poe's enchanted garden still stand in the courtyard, their branches reaching toward windows behind which unknown spirits may still roam—searching, perhaps, for something lost in the mists of Richmond's storied past.