Earlier this week on Monday, exactly one day after the Baltimore Ravens were ousted from the NFL playoffs, was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. A lot of NFL fans outside of Baltimore might be surprised to learn that the Ravens are named after Poe’s famous story about the Raven who cried “Nevermore!”

Baltimore’s most famous poet and short story writer was known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. When I was about seven years old I had a Classics Illustrated Comics version of Poe’s stories. One of them, “The Cask of Amontillado” is the tale of one guy getting another guy drunk in a wine cellar then bricking him into a space in the wall. The thought of getting bricked up like that gave me nightmares for years and to this day small brick enclosures give me the willies.

Poe died in a delirious state when he was only 40 years old. Some historians blame alcoholism while others point to untreated syphilis. Still others propose that it was a heady combo of alcoholism and untreated syphillis that did him in.

Poe was found on a Baltimore street one morning and was taken to a hospital but never regained a mental coherence enough to explain what had happened to him and why he was found, according to police reports, “wearing clothes that were not his own.”

February 12 is the 200th birthday of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. I find it more than a little astounding that two men whose lives and works are so relevant today were born on exactly the same day. It is said that there have been more books written about Abraham Lincoln than any figure in history except Jesus Christ. Two recent ones that are particularly good are Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson and Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

At six-foot-four Honest Abe was a freakish physical specimen back when few American men reached six feet, and his craggy face was an easy target for political cartoonists, particularly those who were against his policies. Many of them cruelly drew Lincoln’s face as if he were a monkey or an ape.

Many of Darwin’s detractors have done the same thing to his portrait over the years, despite the fact that Darwin never claimed that men descended from monkeys, only that we are more closely related in the grand scheme of things than we’d like to admit.

200 years after his birth Darwin is still a lightning rod for heated debates on everything from science and religion in the school system, the separation of church and state, and how the light-sensing eye first came into being.
Interestingly, a recent article in Discover magazine explained how big game hunting, with its emphasis on bagging the largest of the species, is having the opposite evolutionary effect on many species including fish. Lead researcher Chris Dairmont stated, “Human-harvested organisms are the fastest-changing organisms yet observed in the wild. The pattern of loss to predation like hunting and harvesting is opposite to what occurs in nature or even in agriculture; instead of survival of the fittest, human predation encourages survival of the scrawniest.”

Speaking of evolution and 1809, French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published a book called Philosophie Zoologique in 1809, one of the first treatises to outline the concept.

The list of other famous people born in 1809 includes German composer Felix Mendelssohn (Feb. 3), British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (Aug. 6), Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president Hannibal Hamlin (Aug. 27), American physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes (Aug. 29) and American frontiersman Kit Carson (Christmas Eve).

Some famous people kicked the bucket in 1809 as well, including Austrian composer Joseph Haydn on May 31 and Revolutionary War figure Thomas Paine on June 8.

On October 11, American explorer Merriweather Lewis (he of Lewis and Clark fame) died under mysterious circumstances at a Tennessee Inn about 70 miles from Nashville called Grinder’s Stand. Lewis, then the governor of the Louisiana Territory, was found in his room that morning dying of multiple gunshot wounds. Most historians regard Lewis’ death as a suicide. But, really, multiple gunshot wounds? Do you know how hard it was to reload a pistol in those days? If he really shot himself more than once using the old gunpowder, flint and steel ball method, then that’s the most determined suicide in American history.

The real lesson here is to never spend the night in a Tennessee motel with the word “grinder” in its name.

Historic events that happened in 1809 include the January 5 conclusion of the Treaty of the Dardanelles between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, effectively ending the Anglo-Turkish War, and on March 4 James Madison officially succeeded Thomas Jefferson to become the fourth president of the United States.

In 1809 Robert Fulton was granted a patent for the steamboat. While I can’t remember the last time I rode on a steamboat, I’m a big fan of the music of the late great John Hartford. Hartford had a steamboat captain’s license and wrote dozens of songs about steamboats and the Mississippi River including the classic “Steamboat Whistle Blues.”

In May of 1809 Mary Dixon Kies became the first U.S. woman to be granted a patent, one for making cost effective working hats and bonnets from straw, string and ribbon. Although her patented technique was used to make hundreds of thousands of hats, Kies died penniless in Brooklyn in 1837.

Finally, on December 30, 1809 it was made illegal to wear masks at balls in Boston. I imagine furious hostesses trying desperately to tell their guests that the theme of their New Year’s Eve party had been changed at the last minute. “No, we were going to have a masked ball but the government made it illegal. We’re going with a Roman toga theme instead. Bring some sheets.”