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MORE ON THE BURKE & HERBERT BANK VAULTBill Eckberg writes: Tom’s piece about the Burke & Herbert bank was fascinating. I have also heard that an old chest was found in the basement of B&H a few years ago that belonged to Robert E. Lee was and given to descendants. It may be apocryphal, but it’s interesting. True story, actually. And there were two trunks. A July 15, 2007 story from the Richmond Daily Herald recounts how the trunks (belonging to Lee's eldest daughter) was rediscovered after 84 years in storage. -Editor Two old steamer trunks sit in the rare-book room at the Virginia Historical Society, looking worn and forlorn. The smaller one was once red but the paint has faded to a dull rust. The larger one is brown with a piece of tin patching a hole. On one side, a name is stenciled: "M. LEE." That's Mary Custis Lee, Gen. Robert E. Lee's adventurous eldest daughter. In 1917, she stored these wooden trunks in the "silver vault" in the basement of Burke & Herbert Bank & Trust in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va. A year later, she died at 83. Her trunks sat in a dusty corner of the vault for 84 years, unclaimed, until Hunt Burke, the bank's vice chairman, discovered them in 2002. Burke called his high school classmate Rob E.L. deButts Jr., Robert E. Lee's great-great-grandson. Together, the two men descended into the vault. Burke carried a basket of old keys. "The first one I pulled out was a perfect fit," he said. The trunks were stuffed with Lee family papers: a priceless cache of 4,000 letters, photographs and documents. DeButts carted them here to the Virginia Historical Society, which houses the world's largest collection of Lee papers. He spent a week there, picking out treasures and trash from Mary Custis Lee's trunks. Buried deep in one trunk was a letter that former slave Selina Gray wrote to Robert E. Lee's widow, the woman who'd once owned her. It's one of several letters to reveal the complex relationship between the Lees and African Americans. "Mrs Lee, I received your letter and was happy to hear from you," Gray wrote in 1872, "and I was hoping to see you once more at Arlington." Arlington had changed since Mrs. Lee had last seen it in 1861, when the Union Army occupied her family home. To read the complete article, see:
Things have changed even since 2007. A reporter in 2020 would probably write "formerly enslaved person" instead of "former slave" and "once enslaved" vs. "once owned." See the complete article online for much more - it's a fascinating, if non-numismatic story. If you missed the article last week, follow the link below. We'd still like to hear from readers their thoughts on what sort of financial instruments could have been used to smuggle the bank's fortune out of Virginia during the Civil War. -Editor To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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