Ravensworth

The nearby Ravensworth mansion provided a safe haven for Mrs. Robert E. Lee (Mary Randolph Custis Lee) at the beginning of the Civil War. Constructed about 1796, Ravensworth was the home of Mrs. Lee’s widowed aunt, Anna Maria Fitzhugh. The newlywed Lees spent part of their honeymoon there in July 1831. After Mrs. Fitzhugh died in 1874, the Lee children inherited Ravensworth. In 1877, the U.S. government rejected a claim from the estate for reimbursement for 3,000 pounds of hay seized during the war. The house burned in 1926.