The four-acre lot in Williamsburg known as Custis Square has a deep and fascinating history. With the support of donors, Colonial Williamsburg has been studying this site since 2019. Archaeologists are uncovering the endlessly fascinating stories of the people who lived on this land, including enslaved people, hospital patients, and the complicated family of planter John Custis IV. This research will build toward a reconstruction of Custis’s extraordinary garden.
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One of the grandest eighteenth-century gardens in the American colonies.
In 1717, John Custis IV wrote “I have lately got into the vein of gardening.”1 After twenty years of careful growing, he could boast that he had “a garden inferior to few, if any, in Virg[ini]a.”2 John Custis IV used his exclusive garden space to display his wealth and status. Featuring statues, topiaries, arbors, espaliered trees, and gravel walks, it was one of the most notable private pleasure gardens in colonial America. As a result, it is one of the best remaining sites in the country to research the beginnings of ornamental gardening in America.
A very complicated family.
John Custis IV wrote the epitaph for his own gravestone, which claimed he had “aged 71 years, and yet lived but seven years, which was the space of time he kept a bachelor’s house on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.”3 He had an unhappy family life. In 1714, he signed a truce with his wife, Frances Parke Custis, which laid out the terms of an agreement to preserve their marriage.4 Decades later, after Frances died of smallpox, Custis fathered a child named Jack with an enslaved woman called Alice.5 The Custis site allows Colonial Williamsburg to share the full stories of the complicated families that lived there.
A community of enslaved people.
John Custis IV enslaved hundreds of people across several Virginia plantations. At Custis Square, enslaved people maintained the extensive garden. One enslaved man named Peter emancipated himself in 1745. An advertisement seeking the return of Peter that John Custis IV placed in the Virginia Gazette describes how he escaped “with Irons on his Legs,” which his pants were altered to accommodate.6 A reconstructed Custis Square will allow us to inspire and challenge future generations with the stories of the enslaved people who lived and worked here. here.
Learn more: How did enslavers like John Custis IV use the Virginia Gazette to find self-emancipated people?
The Washington family were once the landlords.
John Custis IV died in 1749. His son and heir died eight years later, leaving his enormous inheritance to his widow Martha Dandridge Custis, best known to us today as Martha Washington. She managed the Custis estate as a widow and lived on the estate for three months after her second marriage.
It’s amazingly well-preserved.
Custis Square passed through several owners during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The house inhabited by John Custis IV fell into disrepair over time. The land was later used as a recreational yard for patients at a nearby hospital. Having been relatively undisturbed over the years, it’s an exciting site for archaeologists. Since 2019, Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists have been engaging in an excavation to better understand the site’s garden and the enslaved people who built and maintained it.
The Power of Place
Years of digging have turned up much new information. Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists have learned a great deal about Custis Square and the people who spent their lives there. The Custis Square project offers unique insights into horticultural history, the often-overlooked stories of the enslaved community, and the Custis and Washington families.
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Sources
- Josephine Little Zuppan, ed., The letterbook of John Custis IV of Williamsburg, 1717–1742 (Richmond: Virginia Historical Society, 2005), 35.
- E. G. Swem, ed., Brothers of the Spade: Correspondence of Peter Collinson of London, and of John Custis, of Williamsburg, Virginia. 1734–1746 (Barre, Mass.: Barre Gazette, 1957), 23–24.
- Swem, ed., Brothers of the Spade, 16–17.
- “A Marriage Agreement,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 4, no. 1 (July 1896), 66.
- Philip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and British Atlantic World, c. 1700–1820,” in Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 52–55
- Virginia Gazette (Parks), May 9, 1745, page 4, link.