Early Life and Background Eliza Southgate “Lily” Lawrence was born in 1828 into the established Lawrence and Bowne families of Flushing, Long Island. Her upbringing was marked by close family ties, lively correspondence among siblings, and a strong attachment to her childhood home. Her letters reveal a young woman of affectionate nature, keen observation, and gentle wit.

Marriage and Virginia Life In 1849 she married Armistead Thomson Mason Rust, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point who later resigned his commission. Lily accompanied him to Virginia, where they made their home at Rockland (see Houses and Estates), the Rust family plantation in Loudoun County. Her surviving correspondence records her adjustment to Southern plantation life, far from the familiar world of Flushing. She wrote of dinners, weddings, visits among neighboring families, and local customs, and though she was treated with hospitality, a thread of homesickness appears in her letters.

Letters and Personal Reflections Lily’s letters are marked by candor, a lightness of touch, and an unpretentious grace. From the early period of her marriage, she wrote with affectionate humor of her new life and the cultural contrasts she encountered:

“Armistead is as kind and attentive as one could be, and I begin to feel more at home, though everything is so different from what I have been used to that at moments I could almost fancy myself in a foreign land. Everyone has been most hospitable and full of civilities, yet I long sometimes for one good talk with those who know me as I really am. Armistead laughs at my Northern ways, and I tell him that in time I shall make a Virginian of him, if he does not make a Southerner of me first.”

Her tone deepened after the death of her third child, Armistead, early in 1856. In a letter to her sister Mary, dated January 24, 1856, she wrote:

“I have scarcely written a line since our little boy’s death – three weeks on Sunday. It seems double that time. After the first feeling that death must always cause with a parent, the knowledge that he was so much better off than he could have been had he lived to become the healthiest member of our little family, has made me not only resigned but I may say thankful. God was merciful. Poor little sufferer, four times he had been brought to the brink of the grave and, even as he would rally, I allowed myself to believe that his delicate nature would be supplanted. Up to the last his appetite continued good, and though for three or four weeks his weakness, added to more evident emaciation, made me feel that he must die, it was hard to realize that I could do no more for him.”

Together, these excerpts capture both her early light-hearted adjustment to marriage and the deep faith and resignation with which she later met sorrow. Her letters offer a valuable primary source for the domestic, emotional, and social life of a young Northern wife living on a Virginia plantation in the decade before the Civil War.

Death Lily’s life was brief. She died in 1858 at the age of thirty, leaving three surviving children.