The Potts-Fitzhugh House (also called the Robert E. Lee Boyhood Home) is a historic house at 607 Oronoco Street, Alexandria, Virginia. It served in the early 1800s as the home of Anne Hill Carter Lee and her family, including Robert E. Lee. It should not be confused with the Lee–Fendall House, which is located at 614 Oronoco Street.
Location and description
The home is in Old Town Alexandria.[3] The intersection of North Washington Street and Oronoco Street in Alexandria is called "Lee Corner" because several properties in the area were owned by the extended Lee family.[4] It is across the street from the Lee–Fendall House, which operates as a museum and garden.[5]
The home is in the Federal and Georgian styles; it is made of brick with white trim[5] and sits on a half-acre lot.[3] It has 6 bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms; it is 8,145 square feet.[4]
The home was rented by Fitzhugh to his relative, Henry Lee III ("Light-Horse Harry"), in 1811, at a time when Alexandria was still part of the District of Columbia.[4][6] After being beaten in the 1812 Baltimore riots, Lee left the country and moved to the Caribbean, leaving his wife Anne Hill Carter Lee to raise their children (including Robert E. Lee).[4][6] The family lived at the home until 1816, and in 1820, the now-widowed Anne moved back into the home with her children.[6] The house was the boyhood home of Robert E. Lee, who was born at the family's Stratford Hall plantation in Montross, Virginia, and lived at the Potts-Fitzhugh House until he left for West Point in 1825.[4] Lee later became a Confederate general.[5][4]
The home was operated as a museum from 1967 to 2000,[3] when the Lee-Jackson Foundation, the nonprofit that operated the museum, sold the site to Mark Kington, a managing director at a venture capital firm, and his wife Ann.[4][5][3] It then again became a residence.[4] It was sold again in July 2020 for $4.7 million, and was then offered for sale again in 2021.[4]
The home is among the oldest extant homes in Alexandria; a handful of other structures are older, namely the Ramsay House (built 1695–1751) (today, the Alexandria Visitor Center), Carlyle House (1753), Murray-Dick-Fawcett House (1775), Benjamin Dulany House (1784-1785), Colonel Michael Swope House (1784-1786), Fairfax-Moore-Montague House (mid-1780s), and the Lee-Fendall House (1785).[9]
