A handsome two-storey Italianate mansion built in 1859 by Richard Decatur Lee, a wealthy planter and a distant cousin of Robert E. The house is the only mid-19th-century plantation home left standing on the lower Virginia Peninsula. In April-May 1862, the Confederate generals John B. Magruder and Joseph E. Johnston used it as their headquarters during the Peninsula Campaign — and you can still see where bored Confederate officers carved their initials into the upstairs windowpanes.
Tours cover the Civil War period as well as plantation life and the labour of the people enslaved on the property. The exhibit rooms upstairs cover the Peninsula Campaign in detail.