“Your affectionate Mother,

“M.  WASHINGTON.”

The marriage, it may be added here, sobered John Custis.  He and his bride established themselves at Abingdon on the Potomac, not far from Mount Vernon, and with their little ones were often visitors, especially when the General was away to the war and Mrs. Washington was alone.  Toward the close of the war Jack himself entered the army, rose to the rank of colonel and died of fever contracted in the siege of Yorktown.  Thus again was the mother’s heart made sorrowful, nor did the General himself accept the loss unmoved.  He at once adopted the two youngest children, Eleanor and George Washington Parke, and brought them up in his own family.

Eleanor Custis, or “Nelly,” as she was affectionately called, grew up a joyous, beautiful cultured girl, who won the hearts of all who saw her.  The Polish poet, Julian Niemcewicz, who visited Mount Vernon in 1798, wrote of her as “the divine Miss Custis....  She was one of those celestial beings so rarely produced by nature, sometimes dreamt of by poets and painters, which one cannot see without a feeling of ecstacy.”  As already stated, she married the General’s nephew, Lawrence Lewis.  In September, 1799, Washington told the pair that they might build a house on Grey’s Heights on the Dogue Run Farm and rent the farm, “by all odds the best and most productive I possess,” promising that on his death the place should go to them.  Death came before the house was built, but later the pair erected on the Heights “Woodlawn,” one of the most beautiful and pretentious places in Fairfax County.

George Washington Parke Custis grew up much such a boy as his father was.  He took few matters seriously and neglected the educational opportunities thrown in his way.  Washington said of him that “from his infancy I have discovered an almost unconquerable disposition to indolence in everything that did not tend to his amusements.”  But he loved the boy, nevertheless, and late in life Custis confessed, “we have seen him shed tears of parental solicitude over the manifold errors and follies of our unworthy youth.”  The boy had a good heart, however, and if he was the source of worry to the great man during the great man’s life, he at least did what he could to keep the great man’s memory green.  He wrote a book of recollections full of filial affection and Latin phrases and painted innumerable war pictures in which Washington was always in the foreground on a white horse “with the British streaking it.”  Washington bequeathed to him a square in the City of Washington and twelve hundred acres on Four Mile Run in the vicinity of Alexandria.  Upon land near by inherited from his father Custis built the famous Arlington mansion, almost ruining himself financially in doing so.  Upon his death the estate fell to his daughter, Mrs. Robert E. Lee, and it is now our greatest national cemetery.