Lee Hall

Lee Hall was built between 1848 and 1859 by Warwick County’s leading landowner, Richard Decauter Lee, who rose to prominence through Edmund Ruffin’s ideas of scientific farming that revived tobacco-depleted soil and gave him the means to build the avant-garde Italianate mansion. During the Confederate army’s occupation from May 1861 to May 1862, the house served as a headquarters for Major General John Bankhead Magruder and General Joseph E. Johnston during the Peninsula Campaign’s Warwick–Yorktown Siege. When Magruder first came to the Peninsula in May 1861, R.D. Lee showed him the Warwick River and how it could become the Confederates’ main line of defense, and Magruder then used Lee Hall as one of his headquarters during his year-long command of the self-styled Army of the Peninsula. In the second week of the siege, Johnston and the main Confederate army came down the Peninsula to help block the Union advance, and he used Lee Hall as his temporary headquarters on April 12, when he surveyed Magruder’s fortifications, and again on April 17 after returning from a conference in Richmond. During Johnston’s second day there, he approved Captain Randolph Bryan’s aerial observations of the Federal siege lines, and a hot air balloon was sent up in front of the mansion to test the idea’s feasibility. After taking command on the Peninsula, Johnston reorganized the Confederate command structure, effectively reducing Magruder from army commander to divisional commander of the Confederate right wing from Dam No. 1 to Mulberry Island, while three other generals now outranked him. Irrked by this loss of status, Magruder withdrew to his re-established headquarters at Lee Hall and criticized the design and armament of the defenses he had developed.

Newport News, Virginia · United States