Poore was born at the home of his maternal grandparents in
Newburyport, Massachusetts, to parents Benjamin and Mary Perley (Dodge) Poore whose family estate, Indian Hill Farm, was in nearby
West Newbury, Massachusetts. His father's family were long-time residents of the area; his mother had been born in 1799 in Georgetown, a small incorporated community in the newly defined
District of Columbia. When Poore was seven, his parents took him to
Washington, D.C., for the first time, during the administration of President
John Quincy Adams. About this time, he enrolled in
Governor Dummer Academy in
Byfield, Massachusetts, to prepare for a
West Point appointment. When he was eleven years old he was taken by his father to
England, where saw
Walter Scott,
Lafayette, and other notables. Poore was expelled from Dummer Academy for misbehavior and apprenticed himself to a printer in
Worcester, Massachusetts. Poore's father purchased a newspaper in
Athens, Georgia, the
Southern Whig, which Poore edited for two years. In 1841, he visited Europe again as attaché of the
American legation at Brussels, remaining abroad until 1848. During this period he was the foreign correspondent of the
Boston Atlas. After editing the
Boston Bee and
Sunday Sentinel, Poore returned to the national capital in 1854 as a Washington correspondent. His colorful letters to
The Boston Journal and other newspapers over the signature of "Perley" made his national reputation. , 36-mile walk with barrel of apples, to
Tremont House in Boston, 1856 (Cornell University) He ran for a seat in the
U.S. Congress from
Massachusetts Sixth District in
1856 and lost. He supported
Millard Fillmore in the presidential election that year and lost a wager that Fillmore would win more votes in Massachusetts than his opponent
John C. Frémont. To fulfil the terms of that bet, he transported a barrel of apples by wheelbarrow from his hometown of West Newbury to Boston. He completed the 36-mile course over two days and was met by a cheering crowd of 10,000 that included a military escort on horseback and the members of local Fillmore clubs. During the
Civil War, he organized a battalion of riflemen at Newbury that formed the nucleus of a company in the 8th Massachusetts volunteers, in which Poore served as major for a short time, retaining the title of Major Poore for the rest of his life. In March 1862, Poore and the novelist
Nathaniel Hawthorne were among a small delegation that visited President
Abraham Lincoln at the
White House. In addition to his newspaper writing, Poore served as clerk of the committee of the
United States Senate on printing records, where he edited the
Congressional Directory beginning in 1867 and the
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Poore was elected a member of the
American Antiquarian Society in 1874. In 1885, Poore organized the
Gridiron Club and served as its first president. Designed as social events to bring reporters and politicians together to repair the ill-will sometimes generated by news stories, Gridiron dinners featured satirical songs and skits performed by Washington's leading journalists. The club's annual white-tie dinners continue to attract presidents and other dignitaries. When he died in Washington, D.C., on May 30, 1887,
The New York Times wrote: ==Writings==