Tag: Arlington House (Arlington VA)

Wikipedia says: Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, formerly named the Custis-Lee Mansion, is a Greek revival style mansion located in Arlington, Virginia, United States that was once the home of Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee. It overlooks the Potomac River and the National Mall in Washington, D.C. During the American Civil War, the grounds of the mansion were selected as the site of Arlington National Cemetery, in part to ensure that Lee would never again be able to return to his home.

…The mansion was built on the orders of George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson and adopted son of George Washington and only grandson of Martha Custis Washington. Custis became a prominent resident of an area that was then known as Alexandria County, at the time a part of the District of Columbia.

Arlington House was built at a high point on a 1,100-acre (445 ha) estate that Custis’s father, John Parke Custis, had purchased in 1778 and named “Mount Washington” (“Jacky” Custis died in 1781 at Yorktown after the British surrender). The younger Custis decided to build his home on the property in 1802 following the death of Martha Washington and three years after the death of George Washington. After acquiring the property, Custis renamed it “Arlington” after the Custis family’s homestead on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Almost immediately, Custis began constructing Arlington House on his land. Hiring George Hadfield as architect, he constructed a mansion exhibiting the first example of Greek Revival architecture in America. Custis intended the mansion to serve as a living memorial to George Washington and a place for his collection of George Washington artifacts. Its design included elements similar to those of George Washington’s house, Mount Vernon.

Construction began in 1803, eleven years after L’Enfant’s Plan for the future “Federal City” (later called “Washington City”, then Washington D.C.) had designated an area directly across the Potomac River to be the site of the “President’s House” (later called the “Executive Mansion”, now the White House) and the “Congress House” (now the United States Capitol). Custis located the building on a prominent hill overlooking the Georgetown-Alexandria Turnpike (at the approximate location of the present Eisenhower Drive in Arlington National Cemetery), the Potomac River and the growing Washington City on the opposite side of the river. The mansion was built using materials on site, though the building was interrupted by the War of 1812 (and material shortages after the British burned the American capital city). The Custis mansion’s exterior was completed in 1818.

The north and south wings were completed in 1804. The large center section and the portico, presenting an imposing front 140 ft (43 m) long, were finished 13 years later. The house has two kitchens, a summer and a winter. The most prominent features of the house are the 8 massive columns of the portico, each 5 feet (1.5 m) in diameter.

Guests at the house included such notable people as Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, who visited in 1824 (see: Visit of the Marquis de Lafayette to the United States). At Arlington, Custis experimented with new methods of animal husbandry and other agriculture. The property also included Arlington Spring, a picnic ground on the banks of the Potomac that Custis originally built for private use but later opened to the public, eventually operating it as a commercial enterprise.

Custis married Mary Lee Fitzhugh. Their only child to survive to adulthood was Mary Anna Randolph Custis. Robert E. Lee, whose mother was a cousin of Mrs. Custis, frequently visited Arlington and knew Mary Anna as they grew up. Two years after graduating from West Point, Lieutenant Lee married Mary Anna Custis at Arlington on June 30, 1831. For 30 years Arlington House was home to the Lees. They spent much of their married life traveling between United States Army duty stations and Arlington, where six of their seven children were born. They shared this home with Mary’s parents. After their deaths, Mary’s parents were buried not far from the house on land that is now part of Arlington National Cemetery.

The Custises extensively developed the Arlington estate. Much of the steep slope to the east of the house became a cultivated English landscape park, while a large flower garden with an arbor was constructed and planted south of the house. To the west of Arlington House, tall grass and low native plants led down a slope into a natural area of close-growing trees the Custises called “the Grove.” About 60 feet (18 m) to the west of the flower garden, “the Grove” contained tall elm and oak trees which formed a canopy. An informal flower garden was planted beneath the trees and maintained by the Custis daughters. It is not clear when “the Grove” began to be developed, but it was under way by at least 1853.

Upon George Washington Parke Custis’s death in 1857, he left the Arlington estate to Mary Custis Lee for her lifetime and thence to the Lees’ eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee. The estate needed much repair and reorganization, and Robert E. Lee, as executor of Custis’s will, took a three-year leave of absence from the Army to begin the necessary agricultural and financial improvements.

Civil War

In April 1861, Virginia seceded from the United States. Robert E. Lee resigned his commission in the United States Army on April 20, 1861, and joined the Confederate States Army. With Arlington House on high ground overlooking the capital, the government of the United States knew it must occupy the mansion or be left in an untenable military position. Although unwilling to leave Arlington House, Mary Lee believed her estate would soon be occupied by federal soldiers and left to stay with relatives on May 14, having been warned by her young cousin William Orton Williams, then serving as aide to General Winfield Scott. Union Army troops seized and occupied Arlington without opposition on May 24.

In June 1862, the 37th United States Congress enacted legislation that imposed a property tax on all land in “insurrectionary” areas of the United States. The 1863 amendments to the statute required these taxes to be paid in person. But Mary Lee, afflicted with severe rheumatoid arthritis and behind Confederate lines, could not pay the tax in person. The Arlington estate was seized for nonpayment of taxes. It was auctioned off on January 11, 1864, and the U.S. government won the property for $26,800 ($453,095 today).

During the war, Union Army troops cut down many of the trees on the Arlington estate, especially those to the north and east of Arlington House in and near Fort Whipple (north of the house) and Arlington Springs (near the Potomac River). However, a number of large trees remained, particularly those in a forested area (now known as Arlington Woods) west of the house.

By early 1864, the military cemeteries of Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, were rapidly filling with war dead. Quartermaster General of the United States Army Montgomery C. Meigs proposed using 200 acres (81 ha) of the Arlington estate as a cemetery. United States Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton approved the establishment of a military cemetery on June 15, 1864, creating Arlington National Cemetery. Meigs believed that since Lee had committed treason in deciding to fight against the Union, denying Lee use of the mansion after the war was a rough form of justice. Meigs decided that a large number of burials should occur close to Arlington House to render it unlivable. Officers were to be buried next to the main flower garden south of the house, and the first burial occurred here on May 17. Meigs ordered that additional burials commence immediately on the grounds of Arlington House in mid-June. When Union officers bivouacked in the mansion complained and had the burials temporarily stopped, Meigs countermanded their orders and had another 44 dead officers buried along the southern and eastern sides of the main flower garden within a month.

In September 1866, the remains of 2,111 Union and Confederate soldiers who died at the First Battle of Bull Run, Second Battle of Bull Run, and along the Rappahannock River were buried on the former site of “the Grove”, southeast of the mansion, beneath the Civil War Unknowns Monument.