The columned Arlington House mansion, overlooking the nation’s capital, is best remembered as the home of Robert E. Lee, from the time of his marriage to Mary Custis until the plantation was confiscated by the federal government during the Civil War. The house was begun in 1803 for Mary Custis Lee’s father, George Washington Parke Custis, step-grandson of George Washington, and completed in 1818. The resulting composition, designed by George Hadfield, second architect of the U.S. Capitol, is an architectural masterpiece, one of the nation’s boldest statements of the Greek Revival. In 1874, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered that a national cemetery be established on the Arlington plantation. The house remained the headquarters of the Arlington National Cemetery until 1928 when Congress established it as the Robert E. Lee Memorial. Arlington House was transferred to the National Park Service in 1933.

First established as a historic site dedicated to the memory of General Robert E. Lee in 1925 by Congress, control of Arlington House passed from the War Department to the Department of the Interior’s National Park Service in 1933. Since taking over management of the Arlington House property, the NPS has acquired additional land surrounding the mansion and has completed several restoration efforts. In 1955, Congress officially designated the property a permanent memorial dedicated to Civil War general Robert E. Lee. A 2013 nomination update for the Arlington House expands the historic district boundary to incorporate significant non-NPS-owned federal property that has important historical associations with the house and domestic core of the historic Arlington estate. In addition, the nomination updates the information provided in the 1980 nomination. [NRHP Listed: 3/17/2014]