Still unable to support himself, Poe enlisted in the United States Army on May 26, 1827, under the pseudonym "Edgar A. Perry." (He was eighteen at the time but claimed to be twenty-two.) During his military service, he was stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island in Charleston, South Carolina—a site he would later appropriate as the setting for his story, "The Gold Bug"—and then at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. On February 28, 1829, while Poe was in Virginia, his foster mother, Frances Allan, died.