Arlington House is the historic Custis family mansion built by George Washington Parke Custis from 1803 to 1818 as a memorial to George Washington. Currently maintained by the National Park Service, it is located in the U.S. Army's Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia (formerly Alexandria, D.C.). Arlington House is a Greek Revival style mansion designed by the English architect George Hadfield. The Custis grave sites, garden and slave quarters are also preserved on the former Arlington estate.
George Washington Parke Custis lived at Arlington House with his wife Mary Fitzhugh Custis and their daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis. Custis built Arlington House as a memorial to his namesake, George Washington, husband of his grandmother, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington. Custis inherited the land from his father, John Parke Custis, who died at the end of the American Revolution during the siege of Yorktown. Martha Washington's children and two of her grandchildren were raised at Mount Vernon, the nearby Washington family estate in Virginia. George Washington Parke Custis served in the U.S. Army in the War of 1812 and helped prevent the famous painting of George Washington from falling into the hands of the British.
His daughter, painter Mary Anna Randolph Custis married her childhood friend and distant cousin, then-U.S. Army Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, and all but one of their children were born there. They all lived at Arlington House together as Lee traveled as a soldier in the U.S. Army. It was there that Lee decided to resign from the U.S. Army after having been offered command of it, to eventually lead the Army of Northern Virginia in the Confederate States Army during the U.S. Civil War.
The U.S. Army of the Potomac used the mansion for a headquarters and buried Civil War soldiers in the garden by the mansion. In a gesture of unity after the war, 2,111 unknown Civil War soldiers from both sides and several battles were buried together in a vault located near the mansion.
The government had confiscated Arlington Estate claiming that its rightful owner, Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee, did not pay her property taxes on time in person (she had sent an agent to pay, who was refused). As per the Custis will, Arlington would later go to her son George Custis Lee. After the War, the property was returned to the Lee family, after a Supreme Court decision determined that the Federal Government had unlawfully refused payment, invalidating the subsequent confiscation. Custis Lee sold the property back to the U.S. with the graves undisturbed.
Arlington House is part of the "Arlington National Cemetery Historical Region" on the National Register of Historic Places. The U.S. flag flies at half-staff there whenever funerals are in progress.
Construction and early history
The mansion was built on the orders of George Washington Parke Custis. He was the grandson of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington and Daniel Parke Custis, and the son of Eleanor Calvert Custis and John Parke Custis who was the stepson of George Washington. George W. P. Custis and his sister (Nelly) Eleanor Parke Custis were stepchildren and wards of Dr. David Stuart (their mother Eleanor's second husband). Martha's children and grandchildren were raised by the Washingtons at Mount Vernon. Custis became a prominent resident of an area that was then known as Alexandria County, at the time part of the District of Columbia prior to the District of Columbia retrocession.
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".(1) Rudy, p. 15.(2) Peters, p. 3 The estate lies on the Potomac River. "Jacky" Custis died during the siege of Yorktown in 1781 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.(1) Rudy, p. 15.(2) Peters, p. 5.
Custis began constructing Arlington House on his land, hiring George Hadfield as architect, who 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 plantation house at Mount Vernon.Rudy, pp. 9, 31.
Construction began in 1803, eleven years after L'Enfant's Plan for the future federal city later called "Washington City" and 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" and now the White House, and the "Congress House", now the United States Capitol. Custis located the building on a prominent hill overlooking Georgetown-Alexandria Turnpike at the approximate location of the present Eisenhower Drive in Arlington National Cemetery, the Potomac River and growing national capital of Washington, D.C., 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.Rudy, pp. 16–18, 35–36.
Pierre Charles L'Enfant was an engineer, architect and city planner who served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. L'Enfant designed the layout of Washington City (now D.C.). He is buried in front of the mansion in section 2, grave S-3 overlooking the city he planned.
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.
Notable guests at the house included Marquis de Lafayette, who visited in 1824. 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 Custis family 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 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 before 1853.
Upon George Washington Parke Custis's death in 1857, he left Arlington Estate to Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee for her lifetime when it would then go to her 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. It was at Arlington House that Lee decided to resign from the U.S. Army to eventually lead the Army of Northern Virginia in the Confederate States Army. Though offered command of the U.S. Army, Robert E. Lee resigned his commission on April 20, 1861 and joined the Confederate States Army. With Arlington House on high ground overlooking the capital, the federal government of the United States knew it needed to occupy the mansion or be left in an untenable military position. Although unwilling to leave Arlington House, Mary Custis Lee believed her estate would soon be occupied by Union Army soldiers and left to stay with relatives on May 14, after being warned by her young cousin William Orton Williams, who was then serving as aide to General Winfield Scott. On May 24, 1861, Union Army troops seized and occupied Arlington without opposition.
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 that these taxes be paid in person. Mary Lee, afflicted with severe rheumatoid arthritis and behind Confederate lines, could not pay the tax in person, resulting in the Arlington estate being seized for nonpayment of taxes. It was auctioned off on January 11, 1864, and the U.S. government acquired the property for $26,800 ($ today).
During the Civil 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, which was 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, located 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 U.S. Army Montgomery C. Meigs proposed using 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 and created Arlington National Cemetery. 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 killed in 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.
Post-Civil War
Robert E. Lee did not visit Arlington after the war. He died as president of Washington College in 1870. Mary Lee died in 1873, having visited the house only one more time, a few months before her death. Too upset at its condition, she refused to enter and left after just a few moments.