On this day in Arlington history, November 27, 1754, John Parke Custis is born. He was a Virginia planter, the son of Martha Washington and stepson of George Washington. He bought Abingdon plantation in what was then Fairfax County (now Arlington County) and settled there in 1778 with his wife, Eleanor Calvert, granddaughter of Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore.
According to one account, Custis served on Washington’s staff during the Siege of Boston in 1775-1776 and as an emissary to the British forces there. He became the friend of a young British officer who gave him a weeping willow twig that he planted at Abingdon. The tree that grew from the twig reportedly became the parent of all weeping willows in the United States.
The terms of Abingdon’s purchase were extremely unfavorable to Custis. His behavior in this and other matters prompted Washington to write: “I am afraid Jack Custis, in spite of all of the admonition and advice I gave him about selling faster than he brought, is making a ruinous hand of his Estate.”
John and Eleanor had seven children, The youngest, George Washington Parke Custis (1781–1857) married Mary Lee Fitzhugh and they would have a daughter who married Robert E. Lee.
Custis served as a civilian aide-de-camp to Washington during the siege of Yorktown and contracted epidemic typhus (“camp fever”) there. Shortly after the surrender of Cornwallis, Custis died on November 5, 1781. With Custis’s premature death at age 26, his widow left their two youngest children (Eleanor and George) at Mount Vernon to be raised by the Washingtons. (In 1783, she married Dr. David Stuart of Alexandria, Virginia, with whom she had 16 more children.)
Part of the Abingdon estate is now on the grounds of Washington National Airport. At the time that he purchased Abingdon, Custis also bought a nearby property that after his death became the Arlington Plantation and later, Arlington National Cemetery.
