Biography
She was born in Kentucky to Francis Preston Blair and Eliza Violet Gist Blair. She was the sister of Montgomery Blair, Jessup Blair, and Francis Preston Blair, Jr. When the family moved to "Blair House" across the street from the White House, the President, Vice-President and Cabinet members were frequent guests. Elizabeth's best friend was President Jackson's young niece who was serving as First Lady for her uncle, whose wife had died. Elizabeth lived in the White House one winter because of her health problems from dampness at Blair House.
According to one version of the story, Elizabeth was present with her father when they chanced upon the silver-flecked spring which would inspire the name of the family's summer home in what would eventually become Silver Spring, Maryland. The spring site is memorialized at Silver Spring's Acorn Park though the water source was disrupted in the 1950s.
She married Rear Adm. Samuel Phillips Lee, a US Navy commander in the Union Army during the Civil War. Her letters to her husband, who was away for long periods as commander of the USS Philadelphia, describe wartime life in her homes of Washington, D.C. and Silver Spring, Maryland, during the war. Elizabeth was the mother of Blair Lee, a US senator from Maryland.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Blair Lee
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)