Rust, George jr.

The younger George Rust (known as General George Rust) was born in Loudoun County on 4 January 1788. General George Rust spent part of his childhood in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where he married Maria Claggett Marlow on 8 November 1809. They had seven children: Mary, Olivia, Margaret, Armistead, George, Mary Virginia and Charlotte. Their son Armistead Thomson Mason Rust graduated from West Point in 1842 and served as a colonel for the Confederacy during the Civil War.

General Rust enjoyed a long military and political career. He served as a volunteer defender of Baltimore during the War of 1812 and in 1824 the Virginia legislature commissioned him brigadier general of the Virginia militia. Rust was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates from Loudoun County in 1818-1819 and again from 1820-1823. In the presidential election of 1828 he was an elector for Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun from the 17^th Virginia District. Under the Jackson administration Rust was appointed superintendent of the arsenal and arms factory at Harpers Ferry in 1830, and he held the post until 1837. When General Lafayette visited Leesburg in 1825, Rust served as marshal.

Rust built his Rockland estate near Leesburg in 1822. It is still owned by the Rust family and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1856 Rust became a partner in the banking firm of Appleton & Co. in Baltimore. He took up residence in that city and died there on 18 September 1857 at age sixty-nine. His wife, Maria C. M. Rust, died in Virginia on 19 January 1863—possibly in a tragic accident in which her clothing caught fire from an open fireplace. Both were buried in Union Cemetery in Leesburg, Virginia.

By Courtney Hudson