Stratford Hall: Birthplace of Robert E. Lee

On a bluff above the Potomac stands Stratford Hall, one of the great houses of colonial Virginia and the birthplace of Robert E. Lee. The planter and politician Thomas Lee bought this land in seventeen seventeen, and construction of the brick Great House likely began around seventeen thirty-eight, finished sometime in the seventeen forties.

Its unusual H shape, with two clusters of chimneys rising like towers, has made it one of the most recognizable early American homes. The Lees of Stratford were extraordinary. Two brothers born here, Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee, both signed the Declaration of Independence.

It was Richard Henry Lee who, in seventeen seventy-six, formally moved in the Continental Congress that the colonies ought to be free and independent states. Decades later, in eighteen oh seven, the house saw the birth of Robert E. Lee, who would grow up to command the armies of the Confederacy in the Civil War and to become one of the most studied and debated figures in the nation's history.

He left Stratford as a small child and never lived here again. Since nineteen twenty-nine the estate has been preserved by a private memorial association, and in nineteen sixty it was named a National Historic Landmark. The working plantation was built and sustained by enslaved laborers, whose lives the site now works to document alongside the famous family.