Wye House

Wye House, a plantation on the Wye River on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, was well-known during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for its picturesque gardens and greenhouse, which is believed to be the only extant eighteenth-century example of its kind in the United States. Archaeological excavations conducted on the property between 2005 and 2014 have yielded important insights into gardening practices at Wye House as well as into the daily lives of the plantation’s large enslaved population.

Overview

Alternate Names: Wye House Plantation; Wye House Farm; Home House Farm
Site Dates: 1650s–present
Site Owner(s): Edward Lloyd I (1650s–95); Edward Lloyd II (1695–1718); Edward Lloyd III (1718–70); Edward Lloyd IV (1770–96); Edward Lloyd V (1796–1834); Edward Lloyd VI (1834–61); Edward Lloyd VII (1861–1907); Charles Howard Lloyd and Mary Donnell Lloyd (c. 1907–43); Elizabeth Key Lloyd Schiller (1943–93); Mary Donnell Singer Tilghman (1993–2012); Richard C. Tilghman, Jr. (2012–present)
Associated People: Peter Moir (indentured gardener); Robert Cushney (free gardener); Frederick Douglass (enslaved person); Mr. McDermott (chief gardener); Big Jacob (enslaved gardener); Little Jacob (enslaved gardener); Kitt (enslaved gardener); and Stephen (enslaved gardener)
Location: Talbot County, Maryland
Condition: extant

View on Google Maps

---

History

Wye House was established in the middle of the seventeenth century when Edward Lloyd I (d. 1695), a Welsh Puritan, purchased 3,500 acres of farmland on the Wye River in Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore [Fig. 1 – detail of 1796 map]. The Lloyds relied on a large enslaved workforce to build their fortune raising livestock and growing tobacco, corn, and wheat. The plantation has remained in the continuous possession of the Lloyd family since its founding, and subsequent generations built the late eighteenth-century mansion, gardens, and greenhouse for which the property is known.

Although many of the Lloyds’ buildings at Wye House are still extant, most of the structures associated with the plantation’s large enslaved population no longer survive. Scholar Alan Rice argues that the destruction of most of the physical traces of the lives and homes of the enslaved at Wye House amounts to a “‘symbolic annihilation’ of black presence” on the estate. This destruction contributes to the erasure of slavery from the traditional historical narrative of the site. First-hand accounts by Frederick Douglass (1818–95)—undoubtedly the best-known enslaved person to have lived at Wye House—partially illuminate the abuses enslaved people faced on the plantation and describe the appearance of the Lloyds’ home and gardens (view text). These accounts provide an important “counterbalance [to] the overwhelming influence of the Lloyd family in the historical record.” Furthermore, archaeological excavations conducted between 2005 and 2014 by Archeology in Annapolis and the University of Maryland, College Park, have yielded additional insights about the daily lives and spiritual practices of the hundreds of enslaved individuals who lived and labored on the estate. “Through plants and gardening,” both the Lloyds and the enslaved population at Wye House “maintained cultural connections” to their ancestral homelands (Great Britain and Africa respectively).

Little is known about the design of the first mansion and gardens constructed at Wye House. When Edward I moved to England in 1668, he left the estate in the care of his son Philemon Lloyd (1646–85), who most likely built the first Wye House mansion and other structures. The first house was organized along an east-west axis and was located in closer proximity than the current house to the Long Green, the industrial center of production at Wye House and the center of plantation life for its enslaved residents. It is possible that the elegant Palladian villa depicted in the background at the left-hand side of Charles Willson Peale’s 1771 portrait of Edward Lloyd IV (1744–96), his wife, Elizabeth Tayloe Lloyd (1750–1825), and their daughter Ann (1769–1841) represents the first Wye House mansion [Fig. 2]. A small brick house called the Captain’s Cottage (still extant) may have been an original dependency of the first Wye House and was likely built around 1660–64 and remodeled about 1810. It housed the plantation overseer who, from this location, could see and surveil the slave quarters on the Long Green.

Soon after Edward IV inherited Wye House from his father, Edward Lloyd III (1711–70), he began modernizing its architecture and landscape to keep up with English trends. He commissioned the building of a new manor house—the extant late-Georgian, seven-part mansion—that was likely constructed between 1781–84. Relocated farther from the Long Green than the first house, the construction of the new house also reoriented the landscape ninety degrees from the earlier east-west axis to the current north-south one. A one-story Palladian portico with four columns, added about 1799, covers the mansion’s south-facing front entrance. The landscape visible from the portico was symmetrical and ordered, with two long tree-lined avenues leading from the public road to the house (view text). The avenues formed a circle around a large lawn to the south of the mansion with a ha-ha—one of the earliest known examples in America—that enabled livestock to graze without obstructing the vista from the house. Visitors to Wye House at the end of the eighteenth century, including the artist Charles Willson Peale and the British agricultural writer Richard Parkinson (1748–1815), noted the presence of a small deer park at Wye House, a relatively rare landscape feature in the United States (view text). A one-story veranda added in 1799 to the rear, north-facing side of the mansion covers the central block of the home and provides a view of an expansive green and Wye House’s greenhouse.

Several acres of formal gardens were planted on either side of the green located between the mansion and greenhouse, creating a secluded environment around the Lloyds’ home. The archeologists Mark P. Leone, James M. Harmon, and Jessica L. Neuwirth argue that such geometric gardens, a style favored by the Chesapeake Tidewater elite, was “consonant with the slaveholder ideology” by promoting and controlling “the hierarchy of movement throughout the gardens, the control over access to the gardens, the use of gardens as places to display oneself to visitors and workers alike, and the emphasis on the great house and garden of leisure in the midst of a larger working plantation.” The growing preference for the picturesque in late seventeenth-century British landscape architecture certainly shaped Edward IV’s landscape design as well; he used tall hedges and covered walks to create views that disappear and reemerge as visitors stroll the grounds.

According to Frederick Douglass, visitors from Baltimore, Annapolis, and Easton frequently came to visit the gardens at Wye House and especially the Lloyds’ collection of fruits in the greenhouse (view text). The greenhouse, also known as the orangery, dates to about 1775 and is believed to be the only extant eighteenth-century structure of its kind in the United States [Fig. 3]. Measuring just over 85 feet long, it is composed of a central two-story section with a billiard room that is flanked by two single-story hip-roofed wings [Fig. 2]. Its brick walls are covered with rusticated stucco to imitate stonework. Tall Palladian windows enabled visitors to glimpse the various kinds of flora—decorative, edible, and medicinal—grown inside. The Lloyds sourced many of their plants from England, either through direct connections there or through intermediaries such as Upton Scott (1722–1814), an Irish-born Annapolis-based physician who purchased specimens for the Lloyds and connected them with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Records indicate that there was at least one other greenhouse and a hothouse on the property. A hothouse, constructed around 1784 and located to the southeast of the extant greenhouse, was used until improvements in heating the greenhouse at the turn of the nineteenth century rendered the hothouse redundant (it was demolished in the 1830s). The greenhouse’s new systems—including hot-air-duct heating and a water pump for irrigation—facilitated the cultivation of exotic plants such as orange and lemon trees. Douglass reports that the fruit cultivated in the Lloyds’ garden tempted many enslaved people at Wye House to attempt to sneak produce for themselves, despite the Lloyds’ efforts to exclude them from the garden and the risk of physical punishment if they were caught transgressing the barriers (view text).

Fig. 3, E. H. Pickering and Jack E. Boucher, Wye House Orangery, c. 1933.

According to the archaeologist Elizabeth Pruitt, “The Lloyds cultivated the persona of the scientific gardener and kept social and economic connections to England in order to maintain their place among the Chesapeake elite…. However, the knowledge and abilities to run the plantation’s gardens and care for its plants belonged not only to them, but also to the enslaved gardeners.” A July 1796 inventory of the Lloyds’s library at Wye House reveal an extensive collection of books about agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, including many well-known British publications such as Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary (London, 7th ed., 1759), John Mills’s New and Complete System of Practical Husbandry (London, 5 vols., 1762–65), William Ellis’s Practical Farmer (London, 5th ed., 1759), Thomas Mawe and John Abercrombie’s Universal Gardener and Botanist (London, 1778), James Meader’s Modern Gardner (London, 1771), and numerous books by the English agriculturalist Arthur Young (1741–1820). They also owned more specialized volumes such as William Speechy’s Treatise on the Culture of the Vine (York, 1790) and John Abercrombie’s Hot-House Gardener (London, 1789), as well as architectural treatises including Isaac Ware’s translation of Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (London, 1738), James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture (London, 2nd ed., 1739), Abraham Swan’s Collection of Designs in Architecture (London, 2 vols., 1757), and Thomas Collins Overton’s Original Designs of Temples, and Other Ornamental Buildings for Parks and Gardens (London, 1766). Frederick Douglass reports that the Lloyds brought a Mr. McDermott from Scotland to be the chief scientific gardener on the plantation, and that he worked alongside four assistants (who were likely enslaved). A 1796 census (taken before Douglass’s account) names four enslaved gardeners: Big Jacob, Little Jacob, Kitt, and Stephen.

Archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence points to the fact that African American and European cultivation and use practices coexisted at Wye House. Archaeological excavations at the greenhouse have revealed the presence of a slave quarter in a northwest room. This space likely housed the individuals who ran the greenhouse between 1790 and 1840. Archeologists have also identified four bundles of West and West-Central African objects that they connect to Hoodoo spiritual practices, two of which were found in the greenhouse: one, located at the threshold of the slave quarter, contained two coins and two prehistoric projectile points, while the other, a pestle, was found concealed within the bricks of the greenhouse’s furnace system, likely placed there during its construction. Fossilized pollen collected from the greenhouse slave quarter reveals some of the ways that enslaved people at Wye House utilized plants—both grown and foraged—to meet their nutritional and medicinal needs. The data indicate that the room’s inhabitants consumed bananas and plantains, nightshades, cranberries, blueberries, mustards, and cabbage, as well as medicinal plants that were likely grown by enslaved gardeners, including buckbean, ginger root, arrowhead, arsmart, and phlox. Leone and his team argue that “the pollen at the Wye greenhouse shows a full understanding [on the part of the enslaved] of European gardening and agriculture and a full use of the food-producing environment too,” contributing to the “beginning for our understanding of African American gardening.”

—Lacey Baradel

---

Texts

• Peale, Charles Willson, c. 1790, describing Wye House (Miller et al., eds., 2000: 5:147)

“The Coll. is possessed of immence property, he had 400 Ars. of land in a park to keep Deer, round which was a fence of 20 rails high, Maise were planted within for sustenance of his deer. He also had on his farm an immence number of wild Turkies—the writer has seen 20 of them in a flock. His seat being on Wye river, he had a seine of immence length and breadth, requiring at least 20 men to hawl it, of course the quantity of Fish which at times has been taken is wonderful. at one time and in wares [weirs] he fed sheepshead so that at all times of the summer season he could have them fresh for his table.”

• Parkinson, Richard, 1798–1800, describing Wye House (1805: 1:226–28)

“I then was introduced to Ed. Loyd [sic], Esq. at Why-House, a man of very extensive possessions—I have heard say, thirteen plantations, of one thousand acres each. His house and gardens are what may be termed elegant: and the land appeared the best I ever saw in any one spot in America. He had a deer-park, which is a very rare thing there: I saw but two in the county; this, and another belonging to Colonel Mercer. These parks are small—not above fifty acres each. I could scarcely tell what the deer lived on. There were only some of those small rushes growing in this park which bear the name of grass, and leaves of trees.

“Mr. Singleton and Mr. Loyd had each a field of clover, and all the clover I saw in my ride. If clover were as productive as some authors tell us, there would be more of it grown: but, like mine, it will not pay for mowing. Mr. Loyd had a small field of timothy,—I suppose intended for his saddle and carriage horses,--and the only one I saw in all my ride, of any intended for hay. Mr. Loyd had the finest field of Indian corn I ever beheld—so neat, not a weed that I saw in one hundred acres all in one field; and the corn then going into silk, and in general as high as a man on horseback. He had the best crop of buckwheat I ever saw, intended to be ploughed in the vegetable manure. He had about five acres of pumpkins in good condition. All his crops were better than any other I saw in any part of America, and every thing in the greatest order. He has some very good sheep, fine cattle, and very good horses. Mr. Loyd’s father had some years before imported a bull and two cows from Mr. Bakewell: and from the offspring he had some of the fattest cattle that could be imagined, for the food they had to live upon. He estimated some of his wheat at fifteen bushels per acre; and it was said the produce from eighteen hundred acres of land was eighteen thousand bushels of wheat; which was one of the greatest crops in America.” back up to History

• Douglass, Frederick, 1845, describing Wye House (1845: 15–16)

“Colonel Lloyd kept a large and finely cultivated garden, which afforded almost constant employment for four men, besides the chief gardener, (Mr. M’Durmond.) This garden was probably the greatest attraction of the place. During the summer months, people came from far and near—from Baltimore, Easton, and Annapolis—to see it. It abounded in fruits of almost every description, from the hardy apple of the north to the delicate orange of the south. This garden was not the least source of trouble on the plantation. Its excellent fruit was quite a temptation to the hungry swarms of boys, as well as the older slaves, belonging to the colonel, few of whom had the virtue or vice to resist it. Scarcely a day passed, during the summer, but that some slave had to take the lash for stealing fruit. The colonel had to resort to all kinds of stratagems to keep his slaves out of the garden. The last and most successful one was that of tarring the fence all around; after which, if a slave was caught with any tar upon his person, it was deemed sufficient proof that he had either been into the garden, or had tried to get in. In either case, he was severely whipped by the chief gardener.” back up to History

• Anonymous, 1852, describing Wye House (1852: 59)

“[Col. Lloyd’s] residence is one of the most splendid in this country, being the homestead of the Lloyd family since their first settlement in Maryland. The lane leading from the public road to the house is about half a mile long, and arched with stately rows of linden and magnificent elm trees—the gardens are extensive, and in a most splendid state of cultivation, and the lawns and trees and shrubbery around his beautiful mansion, are tastefully arranged, and present a most lovely appearance. The broad and fertile fields are dotted over with majestic forest trees, which present to the eye a most picturesque and beautiful view of the surrounding country.” back up to History

• Douglass, Frederick, 1855, describing Wye House (1855; repr., 1987: 44–48, 70–71)

“Just such a secluded, dark, and out-of-the-way place, is the ‘home plantation’ of Col. Edward Lloyd, on the Eastern Shore, Maryland. It is far away from all the great thoroughfares, and is proximate to no town or village. . . Its whole public is made up of, and divided into, three classes—SLAVEHOLDERS, SLAVES and OVERSEERS. . .

“. . . . Civilization is shut out, but nature cannot be. Though separated from the rest of the world; though public opinion, as I have said, seldom gets a chance to penetrate its dark domain; though the whole place is stamped with its own peculiar, iron-like individuality; and though crimes, high-handed and atrocious, may there be committed, with almost as much impunity as upon the deck of a pirate ship,—it is, nevertheless, altogether, to outward deeming, a most strikingly interesting place, full of life, activity, and spirit. . .

“There was a windmill (always a commanding object to a child’s eye) on Long Point—a tract of land dividing Miles river from the Wye—a mile or more from my old master’s house. There was a creek to swim in, at the bottom of an open flat space, of twenty acres or more, called 'the Long Green'—a very beautiful play-ground for the children. . .

“Then here were a great many houses; human habitations, full of the mysteries of life at every stage of it. There was the little red house, up the road, occupied by Mr. Sevier, the overseer. A little nearer to my old master’s, stood a very long, rough, low building, literally alive with slaves, of all ages, conditions and sizes. This was called ‘the Long Quarter.’ Perched upon a hill, across the Long Green, was a tall, dilapidated, old brick building—the architectural dimensions of which proclaimed its erection for a different purpose—now occupied by slaves, in a similar manner to the Long Quarter. Besides these, there were numerous other slave houses and huts, scattered around in the neighborhood, every nook and corner of which was completely occupied. . .

“Besides these dwellings, there were barns, stables, store-houses, and tobacco-houses; blacksmiths’ shops, wheelwrights’ shops, coopers’ shops—all objects of interest; but, above all, there stood the grandest building my eyes had then ever beheld, called, by every one on the plantation, the ‘Great House.’ This was occupied by Col. Lloyd and his family. They occupied it; I enjoyed it. The great house was surrounded by numerous and variously shaped out-buildings. There were kitchens, wash-houses, dairies, summer-house, green-houses, hen-houses, turkey-houses, pigeon-houses, and arbors, of many sizes and devices, all neatly painted, and altogether interspersed with grand old trees, ornamental and primitive, which afforded delightful shade in summer, and imparted to the scene a high degree of stately beauty. The great house itself was a large, white, wooden building, with wings on three sides of it. In front, a large portico, extending the entire length of the building, and supported by a long range of columns, gave to the whole establishment an air of solemn grandeur. It was a treat to my young and gradually opening mind, to behold this elaborate exhibition of wealth, power, and vanity. The carriage entrance to the house was a large gate, more than a quarter of a mile distant from it; the intermediate space was a beautiful lawn, very neatly trimmed, and watched with the greatest care. It was dotted thickly over with delightful trees, shrubbery, and flowers. The road, or lane, from the gate to the great house, was richly paved with white pebbles from the beach, and, in its course, formed a complete circle around the beautiful lawn. Carriages going in and retiring from the great house, made the circuit of the lawn, and their passengers were permitted to behold a scene of almost Eden-like beauty. Outside this select inclosure, were parks, where—as about the residences of the English nobility—rabbits, deer, and other wild game, might be seen, peering and playing about, with none to molest them or make them afraid. The tops of the stately poplars were often covered with the red-winged black-birds, making all nature vocal with the joyous life and beauty of their wild, warbling notes. . .

“A short distance from the great house, were the stately mansions of the dead, a place of somber aspect. Vast tombs, embowered beneath the weeping willow and the fir tree, told of the antiquities of the Lloyd family, as well as of their wealth. Superstition was rife among the slaves about this family burying ground. Strange sights had been seen there by some of the older slaves. Shrouded ghosts, riding on great black horses, had been seen to enter; balls of fire had been seen to fly there at midnight, and horrid sounds had been repeatedly heard. Slaves know enough of the rudiments of theology to believe that those go to hell who die slaveholders; and they often fancy such persons wishing themselves back again, to wield the lash. Tales of sights and sounds, strange and terrible, connected with the huge black tombs, were a very great security to the grounds about them, for few of the slaves felt like approaching them even in the day time. It was a dark, gloomy and forbidding place, and it was difficult to feel that the spirits of the sleeping dust there deposited, reigned with the blest in the realms of eternal peace. . .

. . . Nor are the fruits of the earth forgotten or neglected. The fertile garden, many acres in size, constituting a separate establishment, distinct from the common farm—with its scientific gardener, imported from Scotland, (a Mr. McDermott,) with four men under his direction, was not behind, either in the abundance or in the delicacy of its contributions to the same full board. The tender asparagus, the succulent celery, and the delicate cauliflower; egg plants, beets, lettuce, parsnips, peas, and French beans, early and late; radishes, cantelopes [sic], melons of all kinds; the fruit and flowers of all climes and of all descriptions, from the hardy apple of the north to the lemon and orange of the south, culminate at this point.” back up to History

---

---

---

---