Arlington House

Arlington House occupies one of the most contested hills in American memory: built as a monument to George Washington, home to the Confederacy's most famous general, and the literal ground from which Arlington National Cemetery grew out of the wounds of the Civil War.

George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson and adopted heir of George Washington, began building Arlington House in 1802 on a 1,100-acre estate overlooking the new federal city. Custis conceived the Greek Revival mansion, designed by architect George Hadfield with its commanding eight-column Doric portico, explicitly as a living memorial to his step-grandfather, filling its rooms with Washington relics and calling it a 'treasury' of the first president's memory. Construction proceeded in stages and the house was substantially complete by 1818.

In 1831, Custis's only surviving child, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, married a young army officer named Robert E. Lee in the family parlor at Arlington House. The couple made it their home for three decades, raising seven children there between Lee's military postings. When Custis died in 1857, Mary inherited a life interest in the estate. It was at Arlington House, in April 1861, that Lee agonized over and ultimately resigned his commission in the United States Army rather than lead an invasion of his native Virginia, departing days later to offer his sword to the Confederacy.

Union troops occupied the abandoned estate within weeks of Virginia's secession, and the federal government seized it outright in 1864 after Mary Lee failed to appear in person to pay a wartime property tax — a technicality she could not satisfy from behind Confederate lines. That same year, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs began burying Union war dead in the grounds surrounding the mansion, in part, by his own account, to ensure the Lees could never comfortably reclaim their home. The Supreme Court later restored title to the Lees' son in 1882, but he sold the land back to the government. Congress restored the mansion as a memorial to Lee in 1925, and the National Park Service, which has managed it since 1933, now interprets Arlington House alongside the stories of the more than 60 people the Custis and Lee families held in slavery there.