Sully Historic Site

Sully is the house the airport couldn't kill. Richard Bland Lee — Light-Horse Harry's brother, Robert E. Lee's uncle, and northern Virginia's first congressman — built the farmhouse in 1794 on the Salisbury Plain tract his grandfather patented in 1725. He cast votes that mattered: the Bill of Rights, the compromise that put the capital on the Potomac. The votes were cast from a plantation — his father's will had handed him twenty-nine enslaved people in 1787, and more than thirty lived at Sully alongside the family: Titus, Cain, Westminster, Eave, Harry, Joe, Sabina and Sabina's child Joe — names the site's interpretation now speaks.

The house was modest by Lee standards — a rambling farmhouse rather than a mansion — but the woodwork was fine and the piazza's scalloped eaves gave it grace. Financial trouble forced Richard out in 1811; the property passed through cousin Francis Lightfoot Lee II and, in 1842, to the Haights — Quakers from New York whose progressive dairy farming made Sully a different kind of working landscape.

In 1958 the FAA condemned half the property for Dulles International Airport — the plantation house stood in the way of the jets. An act of Congress saved it, the Fairfax County Park Authority took it in 1959, and the house survived to become the rare plantation that lists the enslaved by name on its tours. Dulles's runways now roar beside the cherry lane Lee ordered planted in 1792.

Sully is the archive's saved-by-Congress file — the 1794 farmhouse of northern Virginia's first congressman, where thirty enslaved people are now named on the tour, spared from Dulles's bulldozers by an act of Congress in 1958.