Custis, John, II 1629?-1696

John Custis II (Sr.) (1629 – January 29, 1696) was a North American Colonial British merchant and planter who aligned with governor William Berkeley during Bacon's Rebellion and began a political career in which he served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly and became one of the founders of the Custis family, one of the First Families of Virginia.[1][2] The son of the former Johanna Wittingham[3] and her Gloucestershire-born husband, Henry Custis, may have been born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. His paternal grandparents, Edmund Clift Custis and Bridgett Smithier, had many children, including a son named John Custis (this man's uncle, who had also emigrated to the Virginia colony, but his older age according to the custom of the day may account for this man's now-confusingly being referred to John Custis II).[ This John Custis emigrated to the Virginia Colony probably from Rotterdam in 1649 or 1650. In 1650 Argall Yeardley issued him a certificate for 600 acres of land.[6] In the 1650s, Custis also began holding important local offices, including as surveyor and appraiser of estates.[1] This John Custis and his younger brother William were naturalized British citizens on the same day in November 1658, by a special act of the Virginia General Assembly, possibly because John had been denied appointment as the local sheriff because of his foreign birth.[7] He became the county sheriff in 1659 and again in 1665 and 1666.[1] Custis also was appointed captain of the county militia in 1664, its colonel in 1673, and retired in 1692 as commander of all militia on the Eastern Shore.[1] After fleeing Jamestown in late July 1676, during Bacon's Rebellion, Governor Berkeley took refuge at Arlington plantation, the house this John Custis had erected on his land in what had become Northampton County, possibly because sandbars on Old Plantation Creek forced larger ships to anchor well out to sea and made landing enemy troops difficult (and thus made it defensible). Custis married three times, and each marriage brought additional land. His first wife, the widow Elizabeth Robinson Eyer, bore one son, John Custis III, before her death two or three years later. Custis married the thrice-widowed Alicia Travellor Burdett Walker in 1656.[1] They lived at her father's house, which Custis had purchased from Thomas Burdett while patenting land next to it.[12] During the 1670s, Custis built a grand house that he named Arlington Plantation, which was possibly the finest mansion erected in the Chesapeake Bay area during the 17th century (rivaled only by Governor Berkeley's Green Spring plantation near the colonial capital at Jamestown). However, Alicia died by 1680, when John Custis married the twice widowed Tabitha Scarburgh Smart Brown, who had inherited land from her father Edmund Scarburgh (one of the Eastern Shore's leading planters and former speaker of the House of Burgesses). Tabitha already had borne a daughter who married Custis' nephew. However, the marriage grew rocky over Custis' management of Tabitha's property (and her daughter's prospective inheritance).[13] John Custis prepared his last will in testament in 1691, and on April 15, 1692 resigned from the Virginia Governor's Council, citing extreme violent sicknesses and fits, as well as failing memory and hearing. Although thereafter relieved of civic responsibilities, Custis did not actually die until January 29, 1696,[14] presumably at his Arlington mansion, and was buried near the manor house. By this time his son had already begun his Virginia political career, and would in 1700 begin more than a decade's service on the Virginia governor's council and one of his two grandsons to become burgesses would also serve more than two decades. Archeological excavations have been performed at the former Arlington mansion site, and descendant George Washington Parke Custis who moved into what in John Custis' day was the Northern Neck Proprietary named a mansion there Arlington after this mansion.