Robert E. Lee Boyhood Home

History

History information is some background and history about the location. This is meant to be a basic summary. Below the history records you will find sources in which you can click on to find out more information. There may be multiple history records per location.

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It first owner was John Potts, Jr., who built the house in 1795. The house was built simultaneously with its neighboring structure at 609 Oronoco Street, which became the Hallowell School (Benjamin Hallowell tutored Robert E. Lee as he prepared to enter West Point.) Potts was the Secretary of the Potomac Canal Company under George Washington, the company's president. Washington dined at the house. The second owner was William Henry Fitzhugh. The Marquis de Lafayette visited in 1824 during his visit to the United States.

The home was rented by Fitzhugh to his relative, Henry Lee III ("Light-Horse Harry"), in 1811, at a time when Alexandria was still part of the District of Columbia. After being beaten in the 1812 Baltimore riots, Lee left the country and moved to the Caribbean, leaving his wife Anne Hill Carter Lee to raise their children (including Robert E. Lee). The family lived at the home until 1816, and in 1820, the now-widowed Anne moved back into the home with her children. The house was the boyhood home of Robert E. Lee, who was born at the family's Stratford Hall plantation in Montross, Virginia, and lived at the Potts-Fitzhugh House until he left for West Point in 1825. Lee later became a Confederate general.

Notable later residents includes Royd Sayer, the head of the Bureau of Mines under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ada Hitchcock MacLeish, who helped create the United Nations with her husband Archibald MacLeish, a poet and Librarian of Congress.

The home is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register. It was added to both registers in 1979.

The home was operated as a museum from 1967 to 2000, when the Lee-Jackson Foundation, the nonprofit that operated the museum, sold the site to Mark Kington, a managing director at a venture capital firm, and his wife Ann. It then again became a residence. It was sold again in July 2020 for $4.7 million and was then offered for sale again in 2021.

The home is among the oldest extant homes in Alexandria; a handful of other structures are older, namely the Ramsay House (built 1695–1751) (today, the Alexandria Visitor Center), Carlyle House (1753), Murray-Dick-Fawcett House (1775), Benjamin Dulany House (1784-1785), Colonel Michael Swope House (1784-1786), Fairfax-Moore-Montague House (mid-1780s), and the Lee-Fendall House (1785).

Added by: sdonley on 03/28/2025 DB#:731
Source(s):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee_Boyhoo...

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