The second program in Morven Museum & Garden’s 2026 Grand Homes and Gardens series, Freedom at Home: Telling the Full Story of America’s Founding Homes & Gardens, featuring Stratford Hall in Stratford, Virginia with speaker Dr. Gordon Blaine Steffey, Director of Research and the Jessie Ball duPont Memorial Library. The virtual event will take place March 12 beginning at 6:30 and is $10 for Morven members, $20 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.morven.org/events/grandhomes-stratford-hall

Stratford Hall, located in Stratford, Virginia, was the boyhood home of two signers of the Declaration of Independence, 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 inhabited Stratford as did hundreds of enslaved Africans and African Americans who lived and labored at the plantation. Construction of the site’s Georgian Great House was completed in the 1740s. At that time, an estimated 200 enslaved people were living at Stratford and surrounding properties owned by Thomas Lee, father to Declaration signers Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot Lee.

Today, Stratford Hall stands as a model of Georgian architecture, standing almost entirely as it did in the 1740s. The site interprets the lives of the politically active Lee family. Extensive research, archaeological work, and engagement with descendant communities is ongoing to tell the stories of the people enslaved at Stratford.