The venerable and respected mother of John H. Peyton was affectionately invited by her son and his wife, as soon as they heard of her intention to leave Stony Hill, to make her home at Montgomery Hall, which she decided to do. Mr. Peyton had built immediately, for her exclusive use, a comfortable brick residence in the grounds of and near the mansion. Here she took up her residence in the summer of 1829, and in that snug abode, she spent in singular ease and tranquility the rest of her life. At this time Mrs. J. R. Peyton was of large and striking person, dignified and graceful in manners. She was over 70 years of age, dressed in black, with a high-crowned white muslin cap and frill, a cap in the style of what is now known as the Martha Washington cap, and she looked at first sight eminently neat, precise and stately. She was in fine physical preservation and her mind and memory unimpaired. She was very accessible and companionable, she liked to see her friends and to chat, and her conversation was always full of thought and poetry. Her acquaintance with and knowledge of the leading Southerners of the pre and Revolutionary era was extensive, and she possessed a large fund of information on social, literary, and political topics. This and her anecdotes, racy and amusing, caused her society to be courted by such men as Gen. Baldwin, Daniel Sheffey, and Chapman Johnson. Her parlor was the center of attraction and the rallying point of the family. Her grandchildren especially gathered round her chair, and listened with infantile delight, to her graphic accounts of the war, of the officers and soldiers, of their hair-breadth escapes, of the battles, &c., and at that early day became familiar with the names of the Washingtons, Masons, Conways, Fitzhughs, Lees, Scotts, Marshalls, Moncures, Daniels, Greenes, and other prominent people of the Northern Neck, and all more or less connected with the bloody drama of the war.