Mr. and Mrs. Peter decided to use the fortune left her by her grandmother, Mrs. Washington, to build a stately mansion. They certainly succeeded. They engaged as architect Dr. William Thornton, whose plans for the Capitol had been accepted in the second competition, as the first yielded none sufficiently good.
Dr. Thornton and his wife were intimate friends of the Peters, and a beautiful miniature of him, done by her, is now in the possession of one of the family. Mrs. Thornton was with Mrs. Peter when the British soldiers set fire to the Capitol in 1814, and the two ladies sat at the window of what is now the dining room of Tudor Place—the low part between the main building and the western wing—and watched the conflagration. You can imagine their grief as one saw the work of her husband destroyed, and the other, the building which had been so much in the mind and heart of her revered grandfather.
There is in existence a very lovely painting of Mrs. Peter at about the time of her marriage; a sweet, young girl with light curls, and the embodiment of daintiness. Suspended about her neck is, I think, the miniature which General Washington had painted for her as a wedding gift. When he asked her what she wanted she replied "a replica of himself." He was much pleased that a young girl would want a portrait of an old man! The photograph reproduced of Thomas Peter is from a portrait done by him by his son-in-law, Captain William G. Williams.
Mrs. Thomas Peter (Martha Parke Custis)
While on a visit to Tudor Place occurred the death of Mrs. Peter's mother, the former Eleanor Calvert. She was fifty-three years old, and had borne twenty children.
Mr. and Mrs. Peter had a family of eight children. Three of the daughters had striking names: America, Columbia, and Britannia.
When General Lafayette paid his visit to Georgetown in 1824 it was, of course, most natural that he should be entertained at Tudor Place, as Mrs. Peter had known him in her childhood at Mount Vernon. At that time America met her husband, Captain Williams, who was acting as an aide for the Marquis. In later years, as chief of engineers on the staff of General Zachary Taylor, Captain Williams was killed at the Battle of Monterey. On that same visit Lafayette presented the youngest child, Britannia, a little girl of nine, with a lovely little desk, now in the National Museum in the loan collection of her grandson, Walter G. Peter. On its under side it has an inscription in the handwriting of Martha Custis Peter, telling her daughter its history.
Britannia Wellington Peter was born on January 27, 1815. She died the day before her ninety-sixth birthday, and this editorial, from The Baltimore Sun, gives a fine picture of the changes in the world in the years covered by the span of her life: