Sully: Northern Virginia's First Congressman
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Virginia
The farmhouse at Sully, in what is now Fairfax County, was built in seventeen ninety-four by Richard Bland Lee, the first congressman to represent Northern Virginia. Lee served three terms in the House during the nation's earliest years and helped cast two votes that shaped American geography: he sat in the Congress that sent the Bill of Rights to the states, and he voted to place the permanent capital on the banks of the Potomac River, making Washington D.C.
what it is. He was also Robert E. Lee's uncle, a fact that gives the property a particular resonance in a county that sits between the two capitals that fought each other in the Civil War.
Richard Bland Lee lost the estate to debt in eighteen eleven. Today Fairfax County operates Sully as a historic house museum, one of the few surviving plantation houses in the Washington suburbs, saved by an act of Congress from the development that consumed everything around it.
