Category: Virginia Historical Homes

THE Lee House, at 707 East Franklin Street, was built in 1845 by Norman Stewart, a prominent citizen of Richmond. Structurally, it is unchanged since General Lee’s family occupied it, even to the worn, nickel-plated door knobs. The Lees rented it furnished, so no furniture of theirs was ever here. After 1865 the house had […]

Sabine Hall, one of the ancestral homes of the Carters, is situated in Richmond County near Warsaw, the county seat. Its private road leaves the highway shortly before reaching Warsaw and winds for a mile through the woods to the lodge. The woods adjoining the lawn are composed entirely of native trees, mainly oak and […]

Mount Airy, the distinguished ancestral home of the Tayloe family on the Rappahannock River, in Richmond County, is of interest because of its unusually beautiful situation and as a fine example of the house and surroundings of an early Virginia planter of the wealthiest class. This interest is further increased by the knowledge that the […]

Stratford Hall was built about 1730, by Thomas Lee, president of the Council and acting governor of Virginia. It is of distinctive architecture, unlike any of the other famous colonial houses of the Old Dominion. The walls are in the out-line of a capital H, the wide wings meeting in a great central hall thirty […]

It has been said that it would take a Milton or a Shakespeare to portray the beauty and dignity of Christ Church in Alexandria, the church in which Washington was a vestryman, and where worshipped the aristocrats of Northern Virginia. Like many of the colonial churches in Virginia, Christ Church was built upon the site […]

Few of the great homes in Virginia have a more commanding prospect or more glorious setting than Chatham, situated on a bluff overlooking the Rappahannock River, just opposite Falmouth. Chatham has a wide sweep of the river, up and down the valley, whose waters give access to the Northern Neck, that source-house of genius from […]

WAKEFIELD, the birthplace of George Washington, is situated on Pope’s Creek, an estuary of the Potomac River. The mansion house was built by Augustine Washing-ton about 1718. It was burned December 25, 1780. Under an act of Congress the home is to be rebuilt by the Wakefield National Memorial Association. The site is owned by […]

Falmouth, the thriving but still quaint little village on the banks of the Rappahannock opposite Fredericksburg, is truly the latter’s sister community. Both were incorporated in the same act of the Virginia General Assembly in 1727, but both had their actual beginnings before that time. Fredericksburg’s origin is clearly traceable. That of Falmouth, unfortunately, is […]

Kenmore was for many years the home of Colonel Fielding Lewis, whose wife, Betty, was the beloved sister of George Washington. Colonel Lewis was a patriot of distinguished ability, and gave all of his great fortune to carry on the manufacture of small arms and ammunition at Fredericksburg where the first guns for the Revolutionary […]

The Marye house, now known as Brompton, standing where long ago one of the homes of the Willis’s, of Willis Hill stood, is today a handsome, imposing brick structure with white-columned porch that overlooks the city of Fredericksburg and the plain nearer the Heights, across which thousands of Federal soldiers charged to their death during […]