Alonzo Marion Poe did not marry Sallie Burnett!

A minor matter of historical fact about Washington Territory pioneer Alonzo Marion Poe needs to be decisively corrected. 

He married Emma Hartshorn

The reporting of Alonzo’s marriage is itself a little unclear. Newspaper reports in far away  Olympia merely reported that he had married and don’t record the name of his bride. The marriage took place in Napa California and even the local paper assumed the bride's surname was Hartson.

Even with the aid of a drink, The Napa Reporter,
24 Jan 1863 spelt the bride's name incorrectly.

The fact is that on 19 January 1863, Alonzo Marion Poe was married to Miss Emma Hartshorn. The young Emma was a daughter of Michigan based Reverend Chancellor Hartshorn.

The index record of Alonzo’s marriage to Emma.
The original record and the church which housed it
were destroyed by fire in the 1800s.

To confuse matters, Emma was living with Judge Hartson – and his given name was also Chancellor!

Being a California politician, the Judge was much better known in the north-west United States than the reverend who lived in Michigan. Poe, being a 'lawman' and a newspaperman, visited the Judge which is probably where he met Emma. Some people assumed Emma was related to the judge as his daughter but this is impossible, as all his daughters were too young to marry in 1863. 

Judge Hartson in whose home all these people met. 
From the History of Solano and Napa Counties, 1912.

Certainly, confusion came about because Emma’s surname, Hartshorn, sounded similar and her father’s given name was also Chancellor the same as the judge. This error even crept into the reconstructed index of Poe’s marriage which spells her surname as Hartson.

How did the daughter of a Michigan minister come to live with a California Judge? We don’t know for sure, but both men were born and grew up in Otsego County, New York and were prominent Methodists, so there may well have been a long-standing connection. Perhaps the Reverend thought living in California would be good for his daughter’s health and living with a Judge may improve her prospects for a good marriage. 

Emma had apparently trained to be a teacher in 1845 at the prestigious Hamilton Academy in Madison New York, so may indeed have been a good match for Poe.

Who did Sallie marry?

So, for whatever reason, the story also circulated that Poe had married Sallie Burnett. How might this have come about? Sallie Burnett did marry a Poe but his name was Francis. Francis, as it turned out, was a lawyer as was Sallie’s father so they would all have known the Judge – and possibly each other. The possibilities for casual observers to get things mixed up were high – and then by the time these stories got back to Poe’s acquaintances in faraway Washington State…

However, the evidence is clear, we have the marriage details for Francis and Sallie – though she is recorded as Sarah there. Her gravestone does make it clear that she married Francis Poe and that she is a Burnette as well.

Sallie Poe nee Burnett’s grave marker.

After Poe’s tragic death from tuberculosis in January 1866, Emma returned to her father’s home with a group from the Methodist Church and spent the rest of her life there.

Emma Poe is buried with her Hartshorn parents.

Corrections are being made

Somewhere along the historical line, the story evolved that Poe married Sallie Burnette. This error has been repeated in a variety of places – even the excellent ‘Early Oregonian Search’ website of the Secretary of State of Oregon once repeated the story.

Now I am pleased to say that as of February 2019 this error has been corrected.  

Updated 7 February 2019.