Eltham

Eltham, a mile northwest, was long the home of the Bassetts, a family of wealthy planters and public officeholders. Burwell Bassett (1734-1793), the owner at the time of the Revolutionary War and a proponent of the patriot cause in Virginia, married Anna Maria Dandridge, Martha Washington’s sister. George Washington visited Eltham frequently and was there in Nov. 1781 at the deathbed of his stepson, John Parke Custis, an aide-de-camp during the siege of Yorktown. U.S. Congressman Burwell Bassett (1764-1841) later owned Eltham. The labor of enslaved Africans and African Americans sustained the plantation. The house, a large brick dwelling, burned in 1875.