Stratford Hall
483 Great House Rd.
Stratford, Va.
804-493-8038, http://www.stratfordhall.org

Cheek or Astor guesthouse:
singles, $112 per night; doubles $122 per night

True, Stratford is the birthplace of robert E. Lee. But pecuniary setbacks forced his father to transplant the family to Alexandria before he turned four, and, as far as anybody knows, he never darkened its doorstep again.

Stratford better reflects its secondary sobriquet, “Home of the Lees of Virginia,” where four generations of the patrician family dwelled.

Stratford was built circa 1738 by Thomas Lee, a governor of Virginia colony and father of two Declaration of Independence signers. Thomas’s granddaughter Matilda inherited Stratford and married her cousin Major General Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee III. When she died eight years into the marriage, her will allowed Light Horse Harry to remain at Stratford. He later married Ann Hill Carter, and Robert, born on January 19, 1807, was the fifth of their six children.

Situated on the Potomac side of Virginia’s Northern Neck, the approx-imately 1,600-acre plantation evolved into a self-sufficient “towne in itself,” according to one early visitor, a plantation for tobacco, at first, edible crops when that exhausted the land, and a port-of-call for deep-draft trading ships from England.

Stratford has enough going for it to accommodate two-day sojourns—one to tour the Great House and environs and one to explore its seven nature trails.

I began Day One with the forty-five-minute guided tour of the sixteen-room Great House, beginning in the Great Hall, named as much for its size as its great views of the Potomac to the north and open farmland to the south. High up its walls, above a set of closets that held the library and a mahogany tilt-top tea table owned by one of Thomas’s granddaughters, photographic copies of Thomas, his father, and his grandfather gaze across the room at their respective spouses.

Down East Passage, I peaked into the elegant chamber, where Robert E. Lee was born. The room displays a Thomas Sully portrait of a strikingly contemporary Julia Calvert Stuart, later a bridesmaid at the wedding of Robert and Mary Custis. The adjoining nursery was the setting for the only bona fide Robert-E.-Lee-at-Stratford anecdote. “On the back wall of the fireplace are two angels, one on each side,” says tour guide Rita Wagstaff. “When the family was ready to leave Stratford, they couldn’t find Robert. They finally found him in the nursery, kneeling down in front of the fireplace. He did not want to leave Stratford until he said good-bye to his guardian angels.”

Directly across the passage, the dining room looks like the Lees had just concluded one of their many formal feasts, with Queen Anne chairs around a table set with flat silver with pistol-handled knives. An archway added by Light Horse Harry accesses the Cherry Tree Room, where the family retired for postprandial coffee, tea, and port.

Down West Passage, the parlor (a.k.a. drawing room), where the family entertained, contains a secretary-bookcase owned by the family of Robert’s mother-in-law and a portrait attributed to Gilbert Stuart of Light Horse Harry. Light Horse Harry’s weathered dispatch case and post Revolutionary War battlefield desk grace the library where the men folk gathered to smoke, drink, and gamble.

In the Stetson Reception Center, beside the parking lot, a section called “The Lees of Stratford” provides memorabilia and back story on the Lee clan. The “Preserving Stratford” section details the various stages of the plantation’s renovation, with one case displaying renderings of Robert over the years—drawings, Mathew Brady photographs, and even a lock from the mane of Lee’s storied steed, Traveller.

Next morning, I began my exploration of the grounds along the road to the sheer, yellow cliffs that originally attracted Thomas Lee here in 1717. Rising out of the Potomac, the cliffs consist of compacted sea matter formed during the Miocene era that exists in only three other places in the world (the Los Angeles Basin, Austria, and Belgium). I took the .6-mile Mill Pond Trail along the top of the bluff where a helpful trailside sign identified local trees and shrubs and explained their eighteenth-century uses (e.g., Eastern red cedar: chests, cigar boxes; Sweet bay: beaver bait). It led to the site of the wharf (now a beach) where English ships swapped manufactured goods for tobacco and other crops. Just offshore on the old tobacco rolling road, an eighteenth-century mill rebuilt in 1939 on its original foundation grinds wheat and corn for products sold in the plantation store.

On the way back, I ventured on the .5-mile Silver Beech Trail, a cliff-side path through ravines steep enough to require stairways with rope banisters.
It connects to the more placid .8-mile Little Meadow Trail that ends up at a couple reconstructed spring houses that apparently made a strong impression on a three-year-old Robert E. Lee. Writing in 1861 to a daughter who had just visited Stratford, Lee said, “You did not mention the spring house, one of the objects of my earliest recollections.”

The fifteen-room Cheek House, where I stayed, was built in the 1970s to house participants in annual history teachers’ seminars. My king room (twin doubles are also available) was chain-motel comfortable but a bit characterless—except for the series of drawings “The Four Seasons of the Confederacy” outside the door. Astor House, a more rustic log cabin, has five guest rooms and a living room with an irresistible fireplace.

Stratford’s log cabin dining room serves lunch indoors in a bright space with colonial-style furniture and real-wood fireplace and, during good weather, on a screened porch. The Southern-accented menu features theme sandwiches such as General’s Barbecue (pulled pork) and the West Point Club, with full homestyle meals of chicken, oysters, and crabcakes.

But unless you cook it yourself in the guesthouse kitchen, you’ll have to get off the plantation for dinner in nearby Colonial Beach.

But go back to Stratford, as Lee yearned to do. On Christmas Day, 1861, in the depths of the Civil War while Union troops occupied his home in Arlington, Lee wrote his wife: “...In the absence of a home I wish I could purchase Stratford. That is the only place I could go to, now accessible to us, that would inspire me with feelings of pleasure and local love. You and the girls could remain there in quiet. It is a poor place, but we could make enough cornbread and bacon for our support and the girls could weave us clothes. I wonder if it is for sale and at how much.”

Theodore Fischer writes from Silver Spring, Md.