Antebellum Years
A wealthy widow, Martha Custis was courted by George Washington, whom she married in 1759. Shortly thereafter, he resigned his Virginia military commission and they moved to his farm at Mount Vernon in Fairfax County overlooking the Potomac River.
George and Martha Washington had no children of their own, but raised her two surviving children. Her son, John Parke "Jacky" Custis (1754–1781) married Eleanor Calvert on February 3, 1774. The couple then moved to the White House plantation. After the couple had lived at the White House plantation for more than two years, John Parke Custis purchased the Abingdon plantation, into which the couple settled during 1778.
John Parke Custis died in 1781 after contracting "camp fever" at the Siege of Yorktown. Martha and George Washington then raised his two younger children, Eleanor Parke Custis (later Lewis) and George Washington Parke Custis (1781–1857).
George Washington became the first President of the United States and his wife, Martha, became the nation's initial First Lady, although she was known at the time as simply "Lady Washington." The title of First Lady was traditionally given the President's wife in years thereafter.
In 1802, George Washington Parke Custis began construction on Arlington House, then in the District of Columbia, intending it to become a memorial to his step-grandfather (and adoptive father), George Washington, who had died in 1799. Arlington House later became the home of his daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, born in 1807, who in 1831 married Robert E. Lee. In 1846, most of the area of the District of Columbia south of the Potomac River was retroceded to Virginia, including the land occupied by Arlington House and the surrounding plantation.
Robert E. and Mary Anna Custis Lee had seven children, of whom three boys and three girls survived to adulthood. Of these, the second son was William H.F. "Rooney" Lee (1837–1891), who was born at Arlington House. Rooney Lee was educated at Harvard University, and then followed his father's footsteps into service with the U.S. Army. However, in 1859, he resigned his commission.
Rooney Lee moved to White House Plantation, which he had inherited from his grandfather, who died in 1857. He married Charlotte Wickham, a descendant of attorney John Wickham. They had two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom died in infancy. His wife, Charlotte, died in 1863. The manor house at White House Plantation, which was burned in 1862, had been the second of three which occupied the site of over the years, all destroyed by fires.
White House was the site of the crossing of the Pamunkey River of the Richmond and York River Railroad, which was completed in 1861 between Richmond and West Point, where the Pamunkey and the Mattaponi Rivers converge to form the York River.
Read more about this topic: White House (plantation)
Famous quotes containing the words antebellum and/or years:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)