At the height of the Civil War, Gen. Robert E. Lee thought it best to send his family somewhere safe and out of harm’s way. His wife, Mary Anna, had a cousin in Warren County, so Warren County was where she and the children ended up waiting out the war.
And that is how it came to be that Lee’s favorite daughter, Annie Carter Lee, was buried in Warren County.
For a century, at least.
Annie Carter was only 23 when she died in 1862 of typhoid fever.
The grave marker remains in Warren County, but Annie Carter Lee’s remains were moved to the family crypt at Washington & Lee University in 1994, where the Confederate general taught after the war ended.
Annie Carter wasn’t the only member of the Lee family to die in Warren County – Annie Carter’s nephew, Robert E. Lee, III – the Lee’s first grandchild – died in infancy at Jones Sulfur Springs, a resort that touted the healing powers of the mineral springs there.
That’s something local historian Mark Pace learned when he was researching Annie Carter, the topic of discussion for the most recent Around Old Granville segment of TownTalk.
Gen. Lee’s wife, Mary Anna, suffered from poor health much of her life and Pace said in later years she was confined to a wheelchair.
“She was a great believer in the healing powers of mineral springs,” he said,” and several months of the year, she’d take her daughters and go to her cousin’s place – in Warren County.
Mary Anna’s cousin, William Duke Jones, ran the Sulfur Springs resort. You can still see remains of some of the buildings there. The resort had accommodations for 300 guests, Pace said.
Annie Carter’s gravesite was one of the first sites identified when the state’s historical marker program started back in the 1930’s.
But over the years, Pace said the site was the object of vandalism and so the Lee descendants had the remains disinterred and reburied in Virginia.
The fourth child of Robert E. Lee and Mary Anna Custis Lee, Pace said Annie Carter Lee was her father’s favorite child because of an injury she sustained when she was quite young, which left her with a disfiguring scar on her face.
She contracted typhoid fever by the end of the summer of 1862 and, despite the doctors’ best efforts, she died. Pace said the fatality rate at that time was about 40 percent for people who had typhoid fever.
Two of her brothers visited her gravesite in 1866 to have a formal funeral for their sister, but her father, as the defeated leader of the Confederate Army, was not allowed to leave Virginia.
He finally got to Warren County in 1870 and, along with his daughter Agnes – 1 and ½ years younger than Annie Carter, to visit the grave.
As Pace tells the story, Lee and his daughter asked a young man at the Warren Plains Depot if he could recommend a place for them to spend the night. The man was William J. White, who had been a captain under Lee’s command, recognized the former general and offered his parents’ home as lodging for the night.
That home, Ingleside, stands in Warrenton today.
Word spread quickly throughout the town of the visitors and the reason for the trip, and next morning, Pace said that some 800 people – dressed in their best mourning clothes – lined the streets of Warrenton to pay their respects to the father and daughter who came to visit the grave of their beloved family member.
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