BGuthrie Photos: VA -- Arlington Natl Cemetery -- Robert E. Lee Memorial

VA -- Arlington Natl Cemetery -- Robert E. Lee Memorial:

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Description of Pictures: It had been awhile since I'd been up to the Lee house at Arlington. They've been doing extensive renovation work on it.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] ARLLEE_090830_002.JPG	[2] ARLLEE_090830_006.JPG	[3] ARLLEE_090830_015.JPG
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. ARLLEE_090830_039.JPG: Family Parlor: The Lees and Custises entertained their guests in this parlor and gathered as a family for morning and evening prayers. This room witnessed several special occasions as well. Robert E. Lee and Mary Custis were married here on June 30, 1831. Two other weddings between enslaved couples were also likely performed in the same location.
2. ARLLEE_090830_046.JPG: Dining Room: Family meals were held in the dining room, while larger dinner parties were conducted in the Morning Room. Robert E. Lee proposed to Mary Custis in this room in 1830.
3. ARLLEE_090830_078.JPG: White Parlor: This room was used as a storeroom for nearly forty years. The Lees turned it into a more formal parlor in 1855. Robert E. Lee played a prominent role in decorating this room, and it strongly reflects his tastes.
4. ARLLEE_090830_084.JPG: Parlor room
5. ARLLEE_090830_142.JPG: This star was part of the general's insignia on Lee's Confederate uniform. Gold braid, cloth, and buttons from General Lee's uniform.
6. ARLLEE_090830_150.JPG: The mess kit used by Lee throughout the war
7. ARLLEE_090830_152.JPG: The brass key to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers of the Civil War where 2111 Union dead were interred in the Lee Garden in 1866.
8. ARLLEE_090830_162.JPG: Plate from the Washington breakfast set decorated with the emblem of the Society of Cleveland.
9. ARLLEE_090830_164.JPG: This pin contains a lock of Washington's hair
10. ARLLEE_090830_189.JPG: Hat badge worn by Brevet Colonel Lee
11. ARLLEE_090830_196.JPG: The Lee silver was decorated with the squirrel crest, initial, or sometimes the full coat of arms. These household objects were used at Army quarters and at home at Arlington.
12. ARLLEE_090830_212.JPG: Congress authorized the restoration of Arlington House as a National Memorial in 1925. Twenty-seven years later President Dwight D. Eisenhower used this pen to sign legislation making Arlington House a permanent memorial to Robert E. Lee.
13. ARLLEE_091010_039.JPG: School Room: The Custis and Lee children were educated by tutors in this room before being sent to boarding schools. Some of the enslaved children and adults were also taught to read by Mrs. Custis, Mrs. Lee, and the Lee daughters.
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arlington House (The Robert E. Lee Memorial), is a Greek revival style mansion located in Arlington, Virginia, USA and was once the home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. It overlooks the Potomac River, directly across from 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 General Lee would never again be able to return to his home. Yet the United States has since designated the mansion as a national memorial to its former opponent, a mark of widespread respect for Lee in both the North and South.

Construction and early history:

The mansion was built on the orders of George Washington Parke Custis, a step grandson of George Washington and the most prominent resident of what was then known as Alexandria County. The house was built on a 445-hectare (1,100 acre) estate that Custis' father, John Parke Custis, purchased in 1778. Custis named the house Arlington after the Custis family's homestead on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. George Hatfield, an English architect who also worked on the design of the United States Capitol designed the mansion. The north and south wings were completed between 1802 and 1804. The large center section and the portico, presenting an imposing front 43 meters (140 ft) long, were finished 13 years later. The most prominent features of the house are the 8 massive columns of the portico, each 5 feet (1.5 m) in diameter.

In his day, Custis was the most prominent resident of what was then known as Alexandria County, and the house was host to many of the famous men of the era, including Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette, 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' only child to survive to adulthood was Mary Anna Randolph Custis. Young Robert E. Lee, whose mother was a cousin of Mrs. Custis, frequently visited Arlington. Two years after graduating from West Point, Lieutenant Lee married Mary 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 U.S. Army duty stations and Arlington, where six of their seven children were born. They shared this home with Mary's parents, the Custises.

When George Washington Parke Custis died in 1857, he left the Arlington estate to Mrs. Lee for her lifetime and afterwards to the Lees' eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee. The estate needed much repair and reorganization, and Lee, as executor, took a leave of absence from the Army until 1860 to begin the necessary agricultural and financial improvements.

Civil War:

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union. Colonel Robert E. Lee, who at that time had served in the U.S. Army for 35 years, was offered command of the Union Army. Lee, however, felt that he could not turn his back on the citizens of his native state of Virginia and decided to instead resign his commission in the army, which he did in writing while still residing in the home. After his resignation, Lee reported for duty in Richmond, as commander of the Virginia Provisional Army; he soon joined the Confederate States Army and was promoted to general. Lee was concerned for the safety of his wife who was still residing at the mansion and convinced her to vacate the property at least temporarily. She managed to send some of the family valuables off to safety.

Federal forces occupied Lee's property within a month after Fort Sumter and used it as a headquarters for officers supervising some of the forts that were part of the defenses of Washington. Many of the remaining family possessions were moved to the Patent Office for safekeeping. Some items, however, including a few of the Mount Vernon heirlooms, had already been looted and scattered.

By 1864, the military cemeteries of Washington and Alexandria were filled with Union dead, and Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs quickly selected Arlington as the site for a new cemetery. Meigs, a Georgian who had served under Lee in the U.S. Army and who hated his fellow Southerners who were fighting against the Union, ordered that graves be placed just outside the front door of the mansion, to prevent the Lees from ever returning. Meigs himself supervised the burial of 26 Union soldiers in Mrs. Lee's rose garden. In October, Meigs' own son was killed in the war, and he too was buried at Arlington.

Neither Robert E. Lee nor his wife were to ever set foot on the property again. Mary Custis Lee visited the grounds shortly before she died, but was overcome by emotion and unable to go inside.

Post-war:

The federal government had confiscated the mansion property, in 1864, claiming that property taxes had not been paid. Robert E. Lee and his wife never legally challenged the return of the home. In 1870, after his father's death, George Washington Custis Lee, the eldest son of Robert E. Lee, filed a lawsuit in the Alexandria Circuit Court which resulted in a later Supreme Court decision in 1882 awarding Custis Lee just compensation for the house and 1,100 acres (4 km�). Lee originally asked for $300,000, however, the court only awarded $150,000, considered the fair market value of the property.

In 1920, the Virginia General Assembly renamed Alexandria County as Arlington County, to honor Robert E. Lee and to end the ongoing confusion between Alexandria County and the independent city of Alexandria.

In 1925, the War Department began to restore the mansion, and control of the mansion was transferred to the National Park Service in 1933. Congress designated the mansion as a memorial to Lee in 1955, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.

Today, the mansion is managed by the National Park Service as a memorial to Robert E. Lee while the land surrounding the mansion, known as Arlington National Cemetery, is managed by the Department of the Army.
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