John Custis, II

Notes:

John was born in 1629 at Rotterdam, Holland. He arrived in Virginia in 1651/2 and in the early 1670's built Arlington Mansion on the south shore of Old Plantation Creek in Northampton County.

In 1676 during Bacon's Rebellion, Virginia's royal governor William Berkeley fled from the capital at Jamestown, taking refuge temporarily with John Custis II. Thus, for a short while Arlington was the capital of the Virginia Colony.

He married Tabitha Scarburgh, daughter of Col. Edmund Scarburgh (II) and Mary Cade, after 1675.

He made a will on 18 March 1691 at Northampton Co, VA. John died on 29 Jan 1696. John's will was probated on 10 Feb 1695/96 at Northampton Co, VA.

1. Ralph T Whitelaw, Virginia's Eastern Shore (A History of Northampton and Accomack Counties), p. 971 (A83 - Deep Creek Plantation.

2. James R Revell Sr, Descendants of Randall Revell of the Eastern Shore, Custis Family Lineage Appendix.

3. Virginia M Meyer & John Frederick Dorman, Adventurers of Purse and Person, Virginia, 1607-1624/5.

4. Cynthia McDaniel, to M K Miles.

5. Inc. Arlington Foundation, Custis Genealogy Chart.

6. James Handley Marshall, Northampton Co, VA, Abstracts of Wills & Administrations, 1632-1802, p 151 (will of John Custis, Esq, wife Tabitha).

Major General John Custis (Jr)
John Custis II (Jr) was the founder of the Custis family of Virginia (i.e., progenator of Martha Washington's 1st husband Daniel Custus and Robert E Lee, among others). He was raised in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and moved to Virginia's Eastern Shore in 1649/50. Custis became wealthy through land speculation, tobacco planting, and facilitating trade between Virginia, the Netherlands and its colonies (i.e., New Amsterdam/York). Early in the 1670s Custis built a mansion in Northhampton County and named it Arlington; the house was the namesake of Arlington House, the nineteenth-century home of the Washington and Custis families. During Bacon's Rebellion (1676–1677), John Custis II supported Governor Sir William Berkeley, resulting in his appointment in 1677 to the Virginia Royal Governor's Council. John retired his post in 1692 and died in 1696.

John Custis II may have been born in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, about 1629. He was the son of Johanna Wittingham Custis and Henry Custis, a native of Gloucestershire, England who operated a Rotterdam victualling house, or tavern which served as the hub of the city's English expatriate community. Custis's father was a member of an extended family that was engaged in international commerce, and it is possible that as a young man Custis worked in one of the family's commercial houses. About 1649/50 John II moved to the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where his sister Ann (Custis) Yeardley already lived with her husband Argall Yeardley, the son of Virginia's then Royal Governor, Sir Geore Yeardley. John was a prominent planter and became a member of the governor's Council. Several other members of the Custis family also lived on the Eastern Shores of Virginia and Maryland, including another John Custis, who was probably an uncle or cousin, causing troubles of being misidentified as the father of the immigrant founder of the Custis family of Virginia.

Rise to Power and Military Career

With his family's trading connections and his brother-in-law's help, John Custis II grew wealthy. By 1664, he had accumulated more than 1,000 acres of land, and gained an additional 10,000 acres during the next quarter century. The Custis workforce of servants and slaves soon grew into one of the largest on the Eastern Shore. His commercial activities centered on New Amsterdam, a logical trading destination for a man with his background. He assembled cargoes of tobacco for shipment to the Dutch colony and acted as the Virginia agent for merchants from New Netherland and Rotterdam, as well as New England. Custis's facility in the Dutch language enhanced his value as an intermediary in international commerce. In 1663, when Peter Stuyvesant, Governor of New Netherland, corresponded with the Royal Governor of Virginia on an important admiralty matter, Virginia officials relied on Custis to translate the documents.

Sometime before January 15, 1652, John Custis married a widow, Elizabeth (Robinson) Eyer (or Eyre). She died when their only son, John Custis III (1654–1714), was still an infant. This son would also serve on the Virginia Governor's Council.

About 1656 John Custis II/Jr married the thrice-widowed Alicia Travellor Burdett Walker (whose maiden name is unknown). In about 1679, he married the twice-(thrice?) widowed Tabitha Scarburgh Smart Browne Hill(?), a daughter of Edmund Scarburgh (d. 1671). Tabitha's father, Edmund Scarborgh was one of the Eastern Shore's leading planters and a former Speaker of the House of Burgesses. Custis and his second and third wives had no children who grew to adulthood.

Early in the 1670s John Custis II/Jr built a three-story brick mansion on the south bank of Old Plantation Creek, in southwestern Northampton County. He named the house Arlington, probably after the Custis family's ancestral village in Gloucestershire. With a foundation measuring fifty-four feet by forty-three-and-a-half feet, the imposing double-pile structure was perhaps the finest mansion erected in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, rivaled only by Governor Sir William Berkeley's home Green Spring near Jamestown. Early in the nineteenth century, the name of the mansion inspired Custis's descendant George Washington Parke Custis, to give the same name to his estate outside Washington, D.C.

Custis's lordly surroundings and imperious manner, which involved him in several disputes with his neighbors, earned him the sobriquet "King Custis". As his wealth grew, so did his political power. During the 1650s, before he became a legal denizen of the colony, he held such offices as surveyor and appraiser of estates. Although nominated for sheriff in 1655, Custis did not receive the appointment because of his foreign birth. The assembly removed that obstacle to political advancement in 1658 by passing a law naturalizing him and his brother William Custis. Following, in 1659, John Custis II became the county sheriff, and the following year the governor appointed him to the Northampton County Court. Except for another term as sheriff in 1665 and 1666, he remained a justice of the peace until 1677.

Custis became a Captain in the Northampton County militia in 1664. He was commissioned a Colonel in 1673, and ended his career in 1692 as Commander in Chief of all forces on the Eastern Shore. During Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, he was a Major General in Governor Sir William Berkeley's army. When Governor Berkeley fled Jamestown and took refuge on the Eastern Shore, he made Custis's Arlington his temporary headquarters. Custis's loyalty to the government won plaudits from two of the commissioners King Charles subsequently sent to investigate the rebellion. Sir John Berry praised Custis's courage and generous offer to lend the Crown £1,000 sterling to provision the king's ships, and Francis Moryson once addressed him as "Honest Jack."

Later Years

Custis probably won election to the House of Burgesses in the spring of 1676 when the rebellion broke out, but the sparse surviving records of the assembly session that met in June of that year do not include his name. He was present at the next session, which met at Green Spring in February 1677, after the conclusion of the rebellion. On an unrecorded date before July 5 of that year, the Virginia Lieutenant Governor appointed Custis to the Council. As a councillor he often sat as an additional member of the Accomack and Northampton County Courts. Rumors that Custis was dead or dying resulted in the Privy Council omitting his name from the list of Council members when Francis Howard, i.e., baron Howard of Effingham, was appointed governor in October 1683. Custis petitioned the Crown for reinstatement in 1685 and continued to serve until "Extreame violent Sicknesses," "Extreame fitts," and "the faileing of his Memory and hearing" forced him to retire on April 15, 1692.

Custis achieved dynastic as well as financial and political success. He established a family that remained prominent in Virginia for two centuries. When he prepared his will in 1691, he provided handsomely for his grandson John Custis IV (1678–1749), who later became the third man of that name to serve on the governor's Council. Custis died, almost certainly at Arlington in Northampton County, on January 29, 1696, and was buried near his mansion.

Arlington Plantation, John Custis II (1629-1696)
Along the south shore of the Old Plantation Creek inlet where it converges with the Chesapeake Bay close to what is now the quaint little town of Cape Charles, Arlington Plantation was founded on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. This special site is one of the most historic properties in our nation, yet its significance is little known. For many centuries this area was inhabited by native American Indians, until occupation by English settlers of this site and the area up to the Kings Creek inlet three miles north, Sir Thomas Dale established the first permanent settlement of English colonists on the Eastern Shore in 1617 known as Dale’s Gift. Here, half a century later, a plantation was founded by John Custis II, whose prosperity was demonstrated by the construction of the most magnificent mansion on the whole of the Chesapeake Bay. Apparently he named the plantation in honor of his family’s benefactor, Lord Arlington, although the name was possibly derived from the English village Arlington-Bibury, home to the first generation of the Custis family. More than three hundred fifty years after Arlington mansion first rose high above the waters of Old Plantation Creek, the name itself still lives on, engrained in the minds of all Americans as the land upon which thousands of American soldiers rest eternally, Arlington National Cemetary.

National recognition of the Custis name began when, in 1759, the widow of John Custis IV’s son Daniel, Martha Dandridge Custis and the heir to Arlington Plantation, married army Colonel George Washington when he was only twenty-six years old. As was the custom of the times, on his way to becoming the father of our country, Washington managed the affairs of his wife’s property here on the Eastern Shore. And in the paradoxical twists and turns of history, Martha’s great-granddaughter, Mary A. R. Custis to whom both Arlington estates passed, married another young Army officer, who would become, like George Washington, an icon of the American story. It is indeed ironic that Robert E. Lee would take reluctant command of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia which strived to split the nation that was hardwon by his wife’s legendary ancestor, its first President. And so the prestigeous Custis family, which founded Arlington Plantation on the Eastern Shore and Arlington Plantation on the Potomac River, links George Washington, the Revolutionary War and the founding of our nation with Robert E. Lee, the Civil War and the near destruction of the nation.

The name of the Custis family ancestral plantation, Arlington, lives on today in the American consciousness despite the destruction of its mansion more than two-hundred fifty years ago. In the early part of the nineteenth century, Martha’s grandson George Washington Parke Custis, who was adopted by General Washington and his wife as their son, built a mansion near Mt. Vernon overlooking the Potomac River. He called it ”Arlington” after the first Custis home on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and the vast lands surrounding his mansion became the National Cometary after the Civil War. The Arlington mansion on the Eastern Shore was abandoned sometime during the early part of the 18th century. Its ruins were pilaged and what was left eventually became buried in the farm fields surrounding its site, the only evidence of its grandeur that remained were the prominent tombs of John Custis II and his grandson, John Custis IV.

During the spring of 1987, an archeological survey of the Arlington plantation site near the Custis Tombs revealed sections of a brick foundation for a very large structure that was covered by a foot of soil plowed over a hundred years of farming activity. During 1994, an intensive archeological investigation of the cellars of the mansion was conducted. Eye witness accounts of the mansion dating from 1709 offer brief glimpses of its size, elevations and orientation to the Chesapeake Bay. As well, the beautifully preserved historic records in Northampton County courthouse provide additional sources of information about Arlington. A 1688 reference about a visit to the house in a lawsuit filed that year, is one of the first mentions of a separate dining room in an early Colonial home in Virginia. This annecdote substantiates the archaeological findings at Arlington which determined the house to be the most architecturally sophisticated house of that period, at least fifty years ahead of its time.

Such a large home, built of brick masonry, required laborers and materials and facilities for making the bricks. It is believed that the kilns for firing the newly made bricks are located 3/8 mile south of the ruins on a 15 acre tract of land that contains a modern two bedroom home and barn with horse stable. Behind the home, hidden in the forest and covered with the detritus of fallen leaves, vines and dirt are piles of old and crumbling bricks. That site is at the head of a shallow tidal pond that probably provided the water necessary for mixing the brick clay.

Arlington Plantation on the Eastern Shore, John Custis II
Posted 30 Jan 2023 by John Moore
An enigmatic sign along U.S. 13 near Kiptopeke says "Custis Tombs" and points to the west. After 25 years of wondering about it, curiosity finally won out. I turned onto Arlington Road.

A short distance later, Arlington made a sharp left, and I stayed straight onto Custis Tomb Drive, although not without some misgiving. It appears to be a driveway straight to a large yellow house, but the road, in fact, curves right around behind the house and keeps going for a few miles.

In 1891 a writer for The New York Times drove down this way to see the Custis Tombs.

What was written then still holds true, and I quote: "It does not seem possible that a hundred years ago this was a great plantation with a commerce of its own, but gradually the sites upon which large buildings rested are pointed out, although no sign of them is seen."

Today there is an unpaved parking lot outlined with tar-spattered poles laying on their sides, and a lot of grass. So much grass that it lay like hay on the path that had been mowed through the field to allow access to... a slightly greener patch of grass.

At this spot along Old Plantation Creek was "the most architecturally sophisticated house of the time," according to an archaeological report about the site, written for the owner, Preservation Virginia. The foundation lines of Arlington, a three-story house built circa 1670, stood out pale green against the hay, and upright poles marked the corners.

Some interpretive signs described the now-vanished house, which was built by John Custis II. A member of the Governor's Council, Custis offered refuge to Gov. William Berkeley, who was driven from the colonial capital of Williamsburg in 1676 by Bacon's Rebellion.

Supported by other Eastern Shore residents, Berkeley fought back and captured the rebel fleet that had come after him and resumed power.

"The clash at Arlington proved to be the decisive turning point of the rebellion," the archaeologists wrote.

When John Custis II died, the house went to his grandson, John Custis IV. The house was described by contemporaries as having "a handsome garden and fine orchard" as well as two cellars with plastered walls, brick floors and vaulted ceilings, along with at least three chimneys, three levels and garrets.

Arlington prospered until John IV moved to Williamsburg sometime between 1714 and 1721. The house dwindled away until now all that remains is a few bricks and some interpretive signs.

A box with a sign reading "Please Take One" was empty, so the meaning of small numbered posts around the site remained elusive.

If you're thinking that you've heard the names Custis and Arlington before, you have. John Custis IV was Martha Custis Washington's first father-in-law. After her first husband's death, she married George Washington.

Martha's grandson built a fine house on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., which he named Arlington House after the Eastern Shore site. Today, it is the site of Arlington National Cemetery.

The family plot on the edge of Old Plantation Creek is much smaller. Surrounded by a brick wall and shaded by trees, it contains two tombs.

The smaller one belongs to John Custis II. The larger one belongs to John Custis IV, and on one side is inscribed, "Aged 71 years and yet liv'd but seven years which was the space of time he kept a bachelors house at Arlington on the Eastern Shore of Virginia."

Family/Spouse: Elizabeth Custis. Elizabeth was born in 1637 in Plemonstall, Cheshire, England; died in 1656 in , Accomack, Virginia, USA; was buried in Eastville, Northampton, Virginia, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Family/Spouse: Margaret Michael. Margaret was born in 1658 in , Accomack, Virginia, USA; died on 29 March 1697 in , Northampton, Virginia, USA; was buried in Cashville, Accomack, Virginia, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

John Custis (August 1678–after 14 November 1749) was a member of the Governor's Council in the British colony of Virginia. Often he is designated as John Custis IV or John Custis, of Williamsburg, to distinguish him from his grandfather, father, and other relatives of the same name. The son of John Custis (ca. 1654–1714) (usually designated John Custis III or John Custis, of Wilsonia), who was also a Council member, and Margaret Michael Custis, Custis was born in Northampton County, Virginia. On 4 May 1706 he married Frances Parke, the elder daughter and heiress of Daniel Parke, governor of the Leeward Islands.

Custis had moved to Williamsburg, Virginia by 1717. There he created a magnificent 4-acre (16,000 m2) garden and corresponded with many celebrated horticulturists and naturalists, including John Bartram, Mark Catesby, and Peter Collinson. Custis served on the governor's Council from 1727 until increasingly ill health forced him to request to be suspended in August 1749. In 1744, John Custis took the extraordinary step of petitioning the Governor and Council to set a slave child free. The petition stated the boy was "Christened John but commonly called Jack, born of the body of his Negro wench, Alice."[1]

He died soon after completing his will on 14 November 1749. At his request, he was buried on the Eastern Shore of Virginia at the Arlington plantation. In his will Custis instructed his son, on pain of being cut off with only one shilling, to place on his marble tomb the wording that Custis had "Yet lived but Seven years which was the Space of time he kept a Batchelors [sic] House at Arlington on the Eastern Shoar [sic] of Virginia. This Inscription put on this Stone by his own positive Orders."

His only surviving son, Daniel Parke Custis, was the first husband of Martha Washington.

References

Will in Prerogative Court of Canterbury Registered Wills, Searle 287, Principal Probate Registry, London, England.
Kneebone, John T., et al., eds. Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1998- ), 3:636-639. ISBN 0-88490-206-4.
Zuppan, Jo. "John Custis of Williamsburg, 1678-1749," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 90 (1982): 177-197.
Custis, John (2005) Zuppan, Josephine Little ed. The letterbook of John Custis IV of Williamsburg, 1717-1742 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. ISBN 094561280X, 9780945612803 http://books.google.com/books?id=EkKUjMmxVS0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false
^ Wiencek, Henry (2004). 'An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America', p. 73. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0374529515

"John Custis’s marriage was famously miserable."
In an apocryphal story, he once drove a carriage bearing him and his wife Frances Parke right into the Chesapeake Bay. The following exchange is said to have taken place:

“Where are you going, Mr. Custis?” Frances asked, with the water swirling around them.

“To hell, madam.” Came the reply.

“Drive on,” said Frances, “any place is better than Arlington.”

Source: Wiencek, Henry. An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America. Farrar, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, pg. 72.

Family/Spouse: Frances Custis. Frances was born in 1687 in Williamsburg, Independent Cities, Virginia, USA; died on 14 Mar 1714 in Williamsburg, Independent Cities, Virginia, USA; was buried in Williamsburg, Independent Cities, Virginia, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Daniel married Martha Dandridge in 1749. Martha (daughter of John Dandridge and Frances Orlando Jones) was born on 21 Jun 1731 in Chestnut Grove, New Kent, Virginia, USA; died on 22 May 1802 in Mount Vernon, Fairfax, Virginia, USA; was buried in Mount Vernon, Fairfax, Virginia, USA. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]