Grand Homes & Gardens: Stratford Hall

Blending history, architecture, and horticulture, this year’s Grand Homes & Gardens speaker series, Freedom at Home: Telling the Full Story of America’s Founding Homes and Gardens, showcases the estates of signers of the Declaration of Independence, telling the stories of the people who lived and worked in these grand spaces. 

On March 12, Morven welcomes Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey (Director of Research and the Jessie Ball duPont Memorial Library) for an illustrated presentation on Stratford Hall, the boyhood home of Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee. It was also the birthplace of Robert E. Lee, General in Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States during the Civil War. Four generations of the Lee family lived at Stratford, as did hundreds of enslaved Africans and African Americans who lived and labored at the plantation. Today, the site stands as a model of Georgian architecture, standing almost entirely as it did in the 1740s. 

Light refreshments will be served.

The next programs in the series take place on March 26 and April 16.