Francis Lightfoot Lee is buried in a grave at Mount Airy, near Warsaw on the Northern Neck. Lee and his brother Richard Henry Lee were signers of the Declaration of Independence. FRANK DELANO/THE FREE LANCE-STAR View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

Obscure graves for two heroes

Obscure graves bury the accomplishments of two Northern Neck brothers who signed the Declaration of Independence

Date published: 7/4/2006

By FRANK DELANO

They were brothers whose signatures on the Declaration of Independence made them American heroes for all time.

Now Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee rest in obscure Northern Neck graveyards visited by few, even on the Fourth of July.

"We only come out here when somebody dies," said H. Gwynne Tayloe III.

Tayloe stood Sunday beside a brick-walled cemetery where Francis Lightfoot Lee is buried beside Tayloe's ancestors at Mount Airy Farm near Warsaw. The graveyard is a 10-minute walk from the palatial Palladian mansion that Tayloe's ancestor built 250 years ago on a Richmond County ridge overlooking the Rappahannock River.

Sunday afternoon, Tayloe led a pair of visitors and a pair of dogs around the big, stone house and down three garden terraces. He opened a gate in a high-tensile, electric fence. "Watch your step," he warned as he walked across the cattle pasture.

The graveyard is at the edge of the woods. Vines cover most of the gravestones, including the little granite marker that reads:

FRANCIS LIGHTFOOT LEE A SIGNER OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 1734-1797

The marker "isn't much bigger than one you might get for a pet," said Tayloe's mother. It was placed in the cemetery by a state agency in 1950.

Mount Airy was then owned by two elderly Tayloe women. "The aunts were probably the only people alive who knew where Frank Lee was buried," Gwynne Tayloe said.

Frank's brother, Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), is buried about 15 miles away on the Potomac side of the peninsula at a place called Burnt House Field near Hague.

The name commemorates a 1729 catastrophe that nearly ended the famous Lee dynasty before it really began.

One cold January night, burglars set fire to the home of Thomas and Hannah Lee, forcing them and their children to jump for their lives in their night clothes from second-story windows.

The Lees built their next home like a fortress and named it Stratford Hall.

It was there that their proud, privileged, willful and smart children somehow acquired passions for liberty and independence that helped fuel and win the American Revolution.

'It's just a little country road in the middle of nowhere that leads to this charming little cemetery in the middle of a cornfield.' Janet Nicholls From Monk's Wood Farm near Cambridge, England

Follow us on

Date published: 7/4/2006