The White House
Historical highway marker WO-12 · New Kent County
White House plantation, four miles northeast on the Pamunkey River, was the home of Daniel Parke Custis, one of Virginia’s wealthiest men in the mid-18th century. Custis’s widow, Martha, married George Washington at White House on 6 Jan. 1759, and the couple briefly resided there. The original dwelling was rebuilt early in the 1800s. A workforce of enslaved laborers sustained the plantation. In 1857 the property passed to Martha’s descendant William H. F. Lee, son of Mary Custis and Robert E. Lee. During the Civil War, Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan used White House as a base of operations for a planned attack on Richmond in May and June 1862. The house burned as Union troops departed.
Department of Historic Resources, 2026