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Personal data George Washington Parke Custis 

• He was born on April 30, 1781 in Mount Airy.
• Profession: Writer.
• He died on October 10, 1857 in Virginia, he was 76 years old.
• A child of John Parke Custis and Eleanor Calvert

Household of George Washington Parke Custis

Notes about George Washington Parke Custis

Documented Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Parke_Custis

 

George Washington Parke Custis (April 30, 1781 – October 10, 1857), was the step-grandson and adopted son of United States President George Washington, the grandson of Martha Washington and the father-in-law of Robert E. Lee. He spent part of his large inherited fortune constructing Arlington House on a plantation that was directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. After Custis died, his daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, who had married Robert E. Lee, inherited his estate.

The United States government confiscated the Custis estate during the American Civil War. After the war ended, the Supreme Court of the United States rescinded the confiscation and returned the estate to George Washington Custis Lee, the son of Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee and Robert E. Lee. George Washington Custis Lee then sold the estate back to the United States government.

Arlington House is now the Robert E. Lee Memorial. The remainder of the Arlington plantation is now Arlington National Cemetery and Fort Myer.

Custis purchased, preserved and displayed many of George Washington's belongings, wrote historical plays about Virginia, delivered a number of patriotic addresses, and wrote a memoir of his life in the Washington household.

George Washington Parke Custis (G.W.P. Custis) was born on April 30, 1781, at his mother's family home at Mount Airy, a restored mansion now in Rosaryville State Park in Prince George's County, Maryland.^[1] He initially lived with his parents John Parke Custis (Jacky Custis) and Eleanor Calvert Custis, and his sisters Elizabeth Parke Custis, Martha Parke Custis and Nelly Custis, at Abingdon Plantation (part of which is now the location of Ronald Reagan National Airport), which his father had purchased in 1778.^[2] However, six months after G.W.P. Custis was born, his father died of "camp fever" at Yorktown, shortly after the British army surrendered there.

Custis' grandmother, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, had earlier married George Washington and had raised at Mount Vernon G.W.P Custis' father, John Parke Custis. After John Parke Custis died, George Washington adopted his namesake, G.W.P Custis, and with Martha Washington raised Custis and his sister, Nelly Custis, at Mount Vernon.^[2][3][4] G.W.P. Custis' two oldest sisters, Elizabeth and Martha, remained at Abingdon with their widowed mother, who in 1783 married Dr. David Stuart, an Alexandria physician and associate of George Washington.^[5]

The Washingtons brought George and Nelly, 8 and 10 years old, respectively, to New York City in 1789 to live in the first and second presidential mansions. Following the transfer of the national capital to Philadelphia, the original "First Family" occupied the President's House from 1790 to 1797.

G.W.P. Custis (nicknamed "Wash") attended (but did not graduate) from the Germantown Academy in Germantown (now Philadelphia) Pennsylvania, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. George Washington repeatedly expressed frustration about young Custis, as well as his own inability to improve the youth's attitude. Upon young Custis' return to Mount Vernon after only one term at St. John's, George Washington sent him to his mother and stepfather (Dr. David Stuart) at Hope Park, writing "He appears to me to be moped and Stupid, says nothing, and is always in some hole or corner excluded from the Company."^[6]

Custis descended from a number of aristocratic colonial era families, as well as, through his mother, the British nobility and, very distantly, from the royal House of Hanover and the House of Stuart. George Washington Parke Custis's mother, Eleanor Calvert Custis Stuart, descended from Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore, and Henry Lee of Ditchley, one of whose descendants was Edward Lee, first Earl of Litchfield, who married Lady Charlotte Fitzroy, an illegitimate daughter of Charles II by one of his mistresses, Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland. It is believed he is descended from George I by his natural daughter Melusina von der Schulenburg, Countess of Walsingham, whose extra-marital liaison with the 5th Baron Baltimore produced a son, Benedict Swingate Calvert, his maternal grandfather. His father, John Parke Custis, was the son of Martha Washington through her marriage to Daniel Parke Custis.

Custis' sister, Eleanor Parke Custis Lewis (Nelly Custis) married George Washington's nephew, Lawrence Lewis. As a wedding present, Washington gave Nelly a section of Mount Vernon's land, on which the Lewises established the Woodlawn plantation and constructed the Woodlawn Mansion.^[25] The National Park Service has listed Woodlawn on the National Register of Historic Places.^[25]

Another sister of G. W. P. Custis, Martha Parke Custis Peter (Martha Custis) married Thomas Peter. Using Martha's inheritances from George and Martha Washington the Peters purchased property in Georgetown within the District of Columbia. The couple then constructed the Tudor Place mansion on the property. Tudor Place and its grounds, which the National Park Service has listed on the National Register of Historic Places, contain features that resemble those of Arlington House and Woodlawn.^[26]

On July 7, 1804,Custis married Mary Lee Fitzhugh. Of their four children, only one daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, survived to maturity. She married Robert E. Lee at Arlington House on June 30, 1831. Lee's father, Henry Lee III (Light-Horse Harry Lee) had earlier eulogized George Washington at Washington's December 18, 1799, funeral.^[27]

In 1826, Custis admitted paternity of Maria Carter, who had been born in 1803 to Arianna (Airy) Carter (1776-1880), an African American slave maid at the Arlington estate who had earlier resided at Mount Vernon as a slave of Martha Washington. Maria lived and worked at Arlington as a slave until 1826, when she married Charles Syphax, a slave who oversaw the dining room of Arlington House. Soon after Maria's marriage, Custis freed her and gave her a 17 acres (7 hectares) plot in the southwest corner of the Arlington estate. Maria subsequently raised ten children on her property. Tall trees and stretches of grassland reportedly surrounded Maria's white cottage.^[20][28]

 

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Timeline George Washington Parke Custis

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