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Obscure graves for two heroes

July 4, 2006 12:50 am

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.

John Adams called those Lees, "That band of brothers, intrepid and unchangeable, who like the Greeks at Thermopylae, stood in the gap in defense of their country, from the first glimmering of the Revolution on the horizon, through all its rising light, to its perfect day."

Their radical glimmer came early. Richard Henry Lee's first bill in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1759 proposed a heavy tax on imported slaves to end "that iniquitous and disgraceful traffic."

In a 1766 protest of the Stamp Act, the Lee brothers burned an effigy of a tax man, rallied 115 nearby planters, co-authored and signed resolutions at Leedstown and marched on Tappahannock to tar and feather a Scottish merchant who vowed to use the hated stamps.

With the mob from Westmoreland on his doorstep, the merchant saved his skin by recanting and apologizing.

From then on, Richard Henry Lee and Frank Lee were in the thick of it. On June 7, 1776, Richard stood before the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and offered this motion:

"That these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."

Congress postponed debate on the resolution to give a committee that included Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams a chance to draft a declaration.

The Declaration of Independence was adopted July 4, 1776.

Richard Henry and Frank Lee were the only brothers to sign it.

Richard Henry later served as president of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. He was also active in debating the creation of the U.S. Constitution and served as one of Virginia's first U.S. senators.

The Lee brothers apparently loved the Northern Neck as much as they loved liberty.

Frank Lee married Rebecca Tayloe of Mount Airy in 1769. As a wedding present, her father gave them 1,000 acres and built them a fine house called Menokin. Frank retired from politics in 1785.

He and Rebecca died within 10 days of each other in 1797 and are buried side by side at Mount Airy, a few miles away.

On Sunday, Ernest Buckles, his wife and 14-year-old daughter of Hanover County, went looking for the Lees' graves.

They found the ruins of Menokin now under the care of a foundation dedicated to studying the construction and conservation of historic buildings. They also found Richard Henry Lee's grave near Hague.

But Buckles said they couldn't find Mount Airy, which remains a private residence and is open only on special occasions such as Garden Week.

Richard Henry Lee built a long-gone mansion called Chantilly not far from Stratford. He died at Chantilly in 1794, but he chose to be buried with his parents and grandparents at Burnt House Field.

"Isn't it just a fabulous little spot? 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," said Janet Nicholls of Monk's Wood Farm near Cambridge, England.

An American, Nicholls has lived in England since her marriage in 1967. Also a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she was visiting a friend who took her to both Stratford and the burying ground yesterday.

It turned out to be a relatively busy day at the graveyard.

Stevenson T. Walker of Fredericksburg and Coles Point was also there with his lawn mower trimming the grass between the cemetery's brick wall and the surrounding cornfield.

For the past five or six years, Walker said he has picked red roses, white gardenias and blue hydrangeas from the yard of his Coles Point house and put them on the grave of Richard Henry Lee.

Since his retirement, Walker has become an active member of the Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Society. This year, he said, the society agreed to commemorate Richard Henry Lee's crucial role in the Fourth of July.

The commemoration starts at 8:30 a.m. today at Lee's grave.

"It's not going to be like a wreath-laying at Arlington National Cemetery. And it's not that we'll have 40 people. Maybe there'll be only three or four," Walker said.

"But, 230 years after his brave stroke of the pen, we will honor and remember Richard Henry Lee."

To reach FRANK DELANO:804/333-3834
Email: fpdelano@gmail.com