Cadet Edgar Allan Poe   One morning in June, 1830, Edgar Allan
Poe rode the steamer from New York up the Hudson River to West
Point. His spirits, like his expectations, were
uncharacteristically high. He was about to become a cadet at the
United States Military Academy, but he anticipated only a brief
cadet career; with his prior military experience he expected to
be an officer soon.  The academy Poe was entering was only
twenty-eight years old, but under the guidance of its
superintendent, Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, it was already
beginning to establish a wide reputation as the nation’s first
engineering college. It was still a small institution, though,
and an isolated one; its twenty-five or thirty buildings, laid
out haphazardly in the idyllically beautiful Hudson scene,
presented what was later described as “the effect of a somewhat
irregular village.”  New Cadet Poe was quartered with his future
classmates in the South Barracks and began preparation for his
entrance examinations. South Barracks was the ac