Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial

About this property

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.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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