Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee

Chronicle of this board

Great-granddaughter of Martha Washington · last private owner of Arlington

Mary Anna Randolph Custis was born 1 October 1807 when her mother’s coach stopped at Annefield. She was the only surviving child of George Washington Parke Custis — grandson of Martha Washington, adopted son of George Washington — and Mary Lee Fitzhugh of the Randolph and Fitzhugh houses.

She read Latin and Greek, painted landscapes still kept at Arlington, and chose the bedroom that looked over eleven kinds of rose. On 30 June 1831 she married Lt. Robert E. Lee in the family parlour. Seven children were born in that house.

In 1857 she inherited Arlington and nearly two hundred enslaved people, a fact this chronicle does not soften. In May 1861 Federal troops took the estate. As a refugee she stayed at Ravensworth, in Fauquier, at Hot Springs, and at Audley — her aunt Nelly Custis Lewis’s Virginia house of that name. The Audley name travels with this sister branch.

After the war she lived in Lexington in a wheeled chair, working for crippled soldiers. She died 5 November 1873. She is a sister literature of the Stanley–Griffith house, not a holder of the 1313 writ of Heighley.

Sister house. Founders echo. Not the Barony of Audley of Heleigh.

Wardrobe

Early-nineteenth-century Virginia silk, dark hair, a painter’s calm, no coronet of Heighley. Reconstruction after the Arlington portraits.

Weapons · animals · lands

A pen, a brush, and the title-deeds of Arlington, Romancoke, and White House.

The parrot of the 1830 Hervieu portrait; roses in the Arlington garden.

• Arlington House
• Annefield
• Audley (Nelly Custis Lewis)
• Lexington, Virginia