page_title: Abingdon (plantation)
section_title: Weeping willow
hierarchical_section_title: Abingdon (plantation) / History / Custis and Stuart families / Weeping willow
caption_attribution_description: A View of Alexander Pope's Villa, Twickenham, on the Banks of the Thames.
context_page_description: Abingdon was an 18th- and 19th-century plantation that the prominent Alexander, Custis, Stuart, and Hunter families owned. The plantation's site is now located in Arlington County in the U.S. state of Virginia.
  Abingdon is known as the birthplace of Eleanor "Nelly" Parke Custis Lewis, a granddaughter of Martha Washington and a step-granddaughter of United States President George Washington. Published accounts have credited Abingdon as being the home to the progenitor of all weeping willows living in the United States. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, which occupies part of Abingdon's grounds, contains indoor and outdoor displays that commemorate the plantation's history.
context_section_description: According to accounts that historian Benson J. Lossing and others wrote in the mid- to late 1800s and early 1900s that were based on a story that G.W.P. Custis had told to Lossing, John Parke Custis served on George Washington's staff during the Siege of Boston in 1775-1776 and became an emissary to the British forces there. According to these accounts, Custis befriended a young British officer on the staff of General William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe.  While in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the officer gave Custis a weeping willow (Salix babylonica) twig that the officer had taken from a famous tree that Alexander Pope had planted at Twickenham and that was first of its kind in England.
  The officer had intended to plant his willow sprig wrapped in oiled silk along a stream on land he would seize from the Americans.  However, following his army's defeat, he decided to give the sprig to Custis. 
  Custis then planted the twig at Abingdon.  The resulting tree reportedly became the progenitor of all of the weeping willows growing in the United States at the time of the accounts.
  One such tree reportedly grew next to Arlington National Cemetery near the northern end of George Washington Parke Custis' mansion (Arlington House). Another reportedly grew from a slip of the Abingdon willow that American General Horatio Gates had planted at the entrance to his Rose Hill Farm in Manhattan. That tree, which became known as "Gates's Willow", grew at a site that became the corner of Third Avenue and 22nd Street. The tree was reportedly cut down in 1860. 
  However, two 1840 newspaper articles that had reported G.W.P. Custis' account of the origins of the tree then standing near Arlington House stated that John Parke Custis had planted the Twickenham willow twig "on the banks of the Potomac", but had not identified Abingdon as the specific location of the planting. Further, 21st century writers have questioned the veracity of such accounts.
caption: Denver Art MuseumPortrait of Alexander Pope's villa at Twickenham by Samuel Scott
  (ca. 1759)
exif: {}