Newspaper Article: Where was George Washington Wed?

Richmond Times-Dispatch                         December 30, 1934 

 

Old St. Peter's Church, or Custis Home Held Site

By Priscilla Williams

 

Odd perhaps, and yet there is no letter, no statement, nor any bit of contemporary evidence to show where George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis were married. Of the 35 or 40 volumes that have been written on the life of Washington, not one of them gives conclusive evidence on the place of his marriage.
Parson David Mossom of old Saint Peter's Church recorded the marriage, but he failed to state where the ceremony was performed, and so, historians have been divided in their opinion as to whether they were married in "The White House," the Custis mansion on the Pamunkey River or at old Saint Peter's where Martha Custis was a communicant. Some historians believe in spite of the lack of evidence that they were married in the church. Among those were Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge. The Rev. Arthur Gray suggests that this is perhaps the only subject on which President Wilson and Senator Lodge ever agreed and then both were undoubtedly wrong.
Other historians believe that it is highly improbable that the wedding party ploughed three miles, through the mud on a cold January afternoon, to an unheated church, in order that the ceremony might take place there. But a reason that men may scorn, but every woman will understand, is that the dictates of good taste would have prevented Martha Custis from being married in the same church where she had married her first husband, Colonel Daniel Parke Custis, especially when she had been the mother of four children, two of whom had died.

 

 

The story of Washington's body-servant, Bishop, waiting all afternoon with his horse, while the handsome young colonel lingered to talk to the attractive young widow, is a romantic one, but, as one historian reminds us, the handsome colonel was not Martha Custis' first love, nor was the charming young widow the first love of George Washington. Martha Dandridge Custis had been in love with her first husband, the handsome and wealthy young bachelor, Colonel Daniel Park Custis, master of the plantation, The White House, just a mile up the Pamunkey River from her own home, Chestnut Grove, and Washington had undoubtedly been in love with Sally Fairfax. But the marriage was a happy one, in spite of our modern debunking.

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Most Virginia historians believe the ceremony was performed at the White House, and it has remained for the Rev. Arthur Gray of West Point, Va., a student of Colonial Virginia history, to sift the evidence on both sides and to discover what is the most conclusive bit of evidence that has yet been found. His findings have been recorded in an article in the July issue of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.
The bit of evidence he uncovered is the following record found in an old family Bible, dated November 28, 1806:

"Margaret Anderson was united in marriage to Richard Young, Parson Blair officiating. The marriage ceremony was performed in the very room where Washington was married to the charming Widow Custis."

Margaret Anderson was the daughter of James Anderson who was employed at Mt. Vernon. He was a friend of George Washington and was with him when he died.

 

The handsome, four-chimneyed, white colonial mansion, however, has long since been burned. Only the old foundatons are left, and those are slowly crumbling away, but it was from this White House on the Pamunkey that the name was given to the official residence of the Presidents of the United States, in honor of the wife of the first President.

 

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But old Saint Peter's is still standing and is one of the interesting old churches of Virginia, even if Martha Washington didn't marry both of her husbands there. There is no record to show when the parish of Saint Peter's was formed, but it was probably established in 1654 when New Kent County was formed from York County. The present church was built in 1703 for 146 thousand-weight of tobacco. The steeple was added about 12 years later. There is an old vestry book of the chuch which probably began in 1682 and which has been reprinted by the Colonial Dames. The present pages begin in 1685, but previous pages have heen torn out. On April 12, 1730, it is recorded that "Mr. Daniel Parke Custis was this day sworn a vestryman," and his name is later frequently mentioned.

 

In the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century, the Episcopal Church was the only church of the wealthy Virginia planters, but as may be seen from the extract of a letter written in 1696, the Quakers and Dissenters had begun to drift down from the North.
The following was written by the Rev Nicholas Moreau, who was rector of Saint Peter's from 1696 to 1698, to the bishop of London:

"Your clergy in these parts are of a very ill example. No discipline nor canons of the church are observed. Several ministers have caused such high scandal of late, and have raised such prejudices amongst the people against the clergy, that hardly can they be persuaded to take a clergyman into their parish. As to me, my lord, I have got into the very worst parish of Virginia, and most troublesome nevertheless. But I must tell you I find abundance of good people who are willing to serve God, but they want good ministers--ministers that be very pious, and not wedded to this world as the best of them are. God has blessed my endeavors so far already, that with His assistance I have brought again to church two families who had gone to the Quakers' meeting for three years past. If ministers were as they ought to be, I dare say there would be no Quakers or Dissenters among them. A learned sermon signifies nothing without good example. I wish God would put it in your mind, my lord, to send here an eminent bishop, who, by his piety, charity, and severity in keeping the canons of the church, might quicken these base ministers, and force them to mind the whole duty of their charge . . . An eminent bishop being sent over here will make hell tremble, and settle the Church of England here forever. This work, my lord, is God's work; and if it doth happen that I see a bishop come over here, I will say, as St. Bernard saith in his epistle to Eugenius, Tertius hic digitus Dei ets'.".

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But the Rev. Moreau's beratings need not be taken to seriously. The Rev. David Mossom, who was later rector there for 40 years and who married Martha Dandridge to both Colonel Custis and Colonel Washington apparently did not find it so bad. And does not each generation chide and berate the succeeding one and hold up as a model the one that has just passed? Writing of the same period in 1858, in the Southern Literary Messenger, John Esten Cooke began: "Did you never feel, good reader, that the life of the cities, after all, was not the summum bonum of existence?--that the din of trade was not the sweetest music in the universe? that life held something finer and more satisfying to the heart than dividens, per cents, and bills of lading? occupations more delightful than the trial of a warrant," and further ". . . But in the old days every thing was picturesque: for life had not yet become a mere race for cash--a thing of dollars and cents." What would he write today!
Life was truly picturesque in the eighteenth century in Virginia. There was probably the same race for cash or tobacco, to be more exact, but the race was perhaps a more leisurely one.
The section that is today a sparsely settled, wooded one, in the eighteenth century, was the most flourishing part of the State, with magnificent landed estates or plantations along the banks of the rivers. Along the Pamunkey were the homes of the Chamberlaynes, the Bassets, the Dandridges, the Custis and the Macons and the Littlepages; and that old Saint Peter's about three miles inland from the river was the inspiration and center of their life. The old church with its ancient, crested tombstones bears mute evidence.