The White House

WO-12

White House plantation, four miles northeast on the Pamunkey River, was the home of Daniel Parke Custis, one of Virginia’s wealthiest men in the mid-18th century. Custis’s widow, Martha, married George Washington at White House on 6 Jan. 1759, and the couple briefly resided there. The original dwelling was rebuilt early in the 1800s. A workforce of enslaved laborers sustained the plantation. In 1857 the property passed to Martha’s descendant William H. F. Lee, son of Mary Custis and Robert E. Lee. During the Civil War, Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan used White House as a base of operations for a planned attack on Richmond in May and June 1862. The house burned as Union troops departed.

Department of Historic Resources, 2026

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

James B. Lynch, The Custis Chronicles: The Virginia Generations (Camden, ME: Picton Press, 1997). Patricia Brady, “Daniel Parke Custis,” Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Vol. 3, ed. Sara B. Bearss, et al., (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2006). Patricia Brady, Martha Washington: An American Life (New York: Viking, 2005). Mary Bandy Daughtry, Gray Cavalier: The Life and Wars of General W. H. F. “Rooney” Lee (Cambridge, MA: DaCapo Press, 2002). Charles S. Clark, George Washington Parke Custis: A Rarefied Life in America’s First Family (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2021). Stran L. Trout, “Last of the White House,” 2012 Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992).