G. W. P. Custis

George Washington Parke Custis was the son of John Parke Custis (Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage) and Eleanor Calvert. After his father’s death he was raised at 3200 Mount Vernon Memorial Highway Place 3200 Mount Vernon Memorial Highway Five-farm plantation on the Potomac owned by George Washington from 1761 until his death in 1799; home to Washington, his family, and more than three hundred enslaved people. … by George and Martha Washington as one of their step-grandchildren. He inherited a large enslaved-labor estate and built Arlington House across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., furnishing it as a self-conscious shrine to Washington’s memory and a museum of relics carried out of Mount Vernon.

His daughter Mary Anna Custis Lee Person Mary Anna Custis Lee b. 1808 · d. 1873 Wife of , daughter of , and great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. Brought Arlington House and its Mount Vernon-derived collections into the Lee household. married Robert E. Lee Person Robert E. Lee b. 1807 · d. 1870 United States Army officer who spent much of his childhood in Alexandria at the house on Oronoco Street before his West Point appointment, and who later commanded Confederate … at Arlington in 1831; the Custis family’s vast enslaved-labor holdings transferred via that marriage and Custis’s 1857 will into the Lees’ control, the legal mechanism for which became one of the antebellum era’s most contentious manumission disputes.