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Sully Historic Site helps visitors understand the history of the region near the nation’s capital. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the site includes buildings from the early years of America’s history. It tells the stories of the people who lived and labored there and shows how Fairfax County has changed over time.
Archaeologists have found evidence that Native people used the Cub Run Watershed near Sully Historic Site for thousands of years. They gathered quartzite and other stones along the streams and branches in the area. On a larger scale, by the 1600s, Algonquian-speaking communities lived mostly to the east, Iroquoian groups to the north and Siouan groups to the west. These are three large and diverse cultural and linguistic groups from the mid-Atlantic region.
Sources: Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607–2007, (Chantilly: University of Virginia Press, 2008).
In 1725 the Lee family acquired a 3,000-acre tract of land called Salisbury Plain that eventually included Sully plantation. Within a generation, the Lee’s forced enslaved Black people to live on and labor clearing and cultivating the land. Some of their names were Titus, Cain, Westminster, Eave, Harry, Joe, Hanry, Sabina and Sabina’s child Joe. In 1787, Richard Bland Lee inherited part of Salisbury Plain. He had his plantation and home built there and named it Sully, the name it still has today.
Sources: Information originally from the will of Herny Lee I, 1746.
The house at Sully was built in 1794 as the home of Richard Bland Lee and his wife, Elizabeth Collins Lee. Richard is best known today for serving three terms as Northern Virginia’s first congressman. In this role, he was involved in major decisions such as the ratification of the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution and the vote to make Washington, D.C., the nation's capital.
Richard Bland Lee served in Congress, a position made possible in part by his family’s wealth and reliance on chattel slavery. Chattel slavery, the system practiced in the United States, legally defined Black men, women and children as the personal property of their enslavers. According to records from his father’s 1787 will, Lee inherited 29 enslaved individuals that same year. Their names are among those forced to live and labor at the site.
In 1811, facing financial troubles, Richard Bland Lee and his family left Sully. The land, house and outbuildings were sold to his cousin, Francis Lightfoot Lee II. For most of his time at Sully, Francis struggled with his mental health, and the property was placed under outside care.
Sources: Information originally from the “Will of Henry Lee II of Leesylvania,” Prince William County Deed Book X, p. 129.
Robert S. Gamble, Sully: The Biography of a House, (Chantilly: Sully Foundation Limited, 1973.)
In 1842, Jacob and Amy Haight, a farming couple from New York, bought Sully. After moving to Virginia, they invited their family to join them, including their son Alexander Haight, their daughter Maria Haight Barlow and her husband, James Barlow.
Although the Haight’s identified as Quakers, a religious group that often opposed slavery, records show that they used enslaved labor at Sully.
During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate soldiers crossed the Sully property and camped in the area. As Northerners living in Virginia, the Haight’s and Barlow’s faced the difficult task of dealing with both sides of the conflict.
Sources: Charles V. Mauro, The Civil War in Fairfax County: Civilians and Soldiers, (Charleston: The History Press, 2008.)
After the Civil War, the ownership of Sully changed again. The Shear family purchased the property and ran it as a farm and dairy through the early 1900s.
The property changed hands several more times before Frederick Nolting bought it in 1946. Nolting, a U.S. Department of State veteran and career diplomat, later served as the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam during the John F. Kennedy administration in the 1960s.
Nolting’s time at Sully marked a turning point in the site’s history. In the late 1950s, plans for Dulles Airport threatened the property and nearby communities. Nolting worked with local advocates such as Eddie Wagstaff and Elanor Lee Templeman to protect Sully. Together, they helped secure federal legislation that saved part of the property from demolition.
Since 1959, Sully Historic Site has been operated by the Fairfax County Park Authority. It sits on a smaller part of the original Lee property on the western edge of Fairfax County.
More than 200 years later, many of the original buildings remain, including the Sully house, a smokehouse, the kitchen and laundry, a lumber house and a stone dairy. Archaeologists have also identified where enslaved people once lived, about 300 yards from the main house. Today, a period-appropriate structure has been built on that site to help tell their story.
This summary highlights just a few of the people and stories connected to Sully Historic Site. There is much more to discover.
To learn more, visit Sully Historic Site’s website or call 703-437-1794 (TTY 711) for information about tours and programs.