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History of Early American Landscape Design

Difference between revisions of "Wye House"

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==Texts==
 
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*Peale, Charles Willson, c. 1790, describing Wye House (Miller et al., eds., 2000: 5:147)<ref>Lillian B. Miller et al., eds., ''The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family'', vol. 5, ''The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale'' (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), [https://www.zotero.org/groups/54737/keywords_in_early_american_landscape_design/items/itemKey/IZAKPCBG? view on Zotero]<ref/>
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:“The Coll. is possessed of immence property, he had 400 Ars. of land in a [[park]] to keep [[Deer park|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.”
  
 
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Revision as of 15:55, December 4, 2019

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

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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].[1] The Lloyds relied on a large enslaved workforce to build their fortune raising livestock and growing tobacco, corn, and wheat.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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 – link to Douglass 1855). These accounts provide an important “counterbalance [to] the overwhelming influence of the Lloyd family in the historical record.”[5] 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.[6] “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).[7]

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].[8] 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.[9]

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.[10] He commissioned the building of a new manor house—the extant late-Georgian, seven-part mansion—that was likely constructed between 1781–84.[11] 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 – Anonymous 1852). 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.[12] 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 – Parkinson). 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.”[13] 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.[14]

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 –Douglass 1845). 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.[15] 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 – Douglass 1845).

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.”[16] 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).[17] 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.[18]

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.[19] 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.[20] 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.”[21]

Lacey Baradel


Texts

  • Peale, Charles Willson, c. 1790, describing Wye House (Miller et al., eds., 2000: 5:147)<ref>Lillian B. Miller et al., eds., The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, vol. 5, The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), view on ZoteroCite error: The opening <ref> tag is malformed or has a bad name
“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.”

Images


Other Resources


Notes

  1. J. Donnell Tilghman writes that the tracts at Wye were granted to Edward I in 1658. J. Donnell Tilghman, “Wye House,” in Gardens of Colony and State: Gardens and Gardeners of the American Colonies and the Republic before 1840, vol. 2, edited by Alice B. Lockwood (New York: Charles Scribner’s for the Garden Club of America, 2000), 139, view on Zotero.
  2. Jean B. Russo discusses the agricultural labor used to run Edward Lloyd IV’s plantations, including Wye House. See Russo, “A Model Planter: Edward Lloyd IV of Maryland, 1770–1796,” William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 1 (January 1992): 62–88, view on Zotero.
  3. Edward IV’s mansion, many of the Lloyds’ gardens, the Lloyd family cemetery, a smokehouse, stables, and a seventeenth-century house known as the Captain’s Cottage survive. The slave quarters on the Long Green and near the agricultural fields, the blacksmith’s and carpenter’s shops, and various storehouses are no longer standing. Elizabeth Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape of Wye House: Nature, Spirituality, and Social Order (Lantham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), xvi, view on Zotero.
  4. Alan Rice, “The History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Heritage from Below in Action: Guerrilla Memorialisation in the Era of Bicentennial Commemoration,” in Heritage from Below, edited by Iain J.M. Robertson (London: Routledge, 2012), 220, view on Zotero. This “steady disappearance of quarters and work buildings in the early twentieth century” was also the result of “Emancipation and downsizing of labor.” Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, 10, view on Zotero.
  5. Elizabeth Pruitt, “Transatlantic Roots: Cultural Uses of Plants at the Wye House Plantation,” in Atlantic Crossings in the Wake of Frederick Douglass: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture, edited by Mark P. Leone and Lee M. Jenkins (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2017), 4, view on Zotero.
  6. Mary Tilghman, an eleventh-generation descendant of Edward Lloyd I, invited the researchers to excavate at Wye House, but the team also solicited input from the descendants of enslaved residents, many of whom still live in the vicinity. After consulting with the descendants of the Lloyds and people enslaved by the Lloyds, the archaeologists concentrated their efforts on understanding the history of gardening at Wye House and the daily lives and spiritual and religious practices of the plantation’s enslaved population. The Archeology in Annapolis project, founded in 1981, is a collaboration between the University of Maryland, College Park, and the Historic Annapolis Foundation to conduct publicly engaged archaeological research. In 2001, Archeology in Annapolis began to expand its excavation sites to include places on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, first to Wye Hall (not related to Wye House) and then Wye House and Easton. Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, 69–71, view on Zotero.
  7. Pruitt, “Transatlantic Roots,” 5, view on Zotero.
  8. Peale painted the Lloyds at Wye House during the spring and summer of 1771. Christopher Weeks, Where Land and Water Intertwine: An Architectural History of Talbot County, Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 58n18, view on Zotero.
  9. “Wye House,” National Historic Landmark Nomination Form (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior. National Park Service, 2009), 5, view on Zotero; Rice 2012, 221–22, view on Zotero; and Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, 51, 69–70, view on Zotero. The cottage is where, according to Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, the overseer Aaron Anthony brutally and repeatedly whipped Douglass’s Aunt Hester.
  10. Pruitt argues, “Everything from agricultural tools, gardening manuals, seeds, plant cuttings, and stylistic trends came from England to Wye House.” In 1793, for example, Lloyd purchased a dozen each of garden rakes, garden scythes, and garden hoes from Oxley, Hancock & Co. of London. Pruitt, “Transatlantic Roots,” 5–6, view on Zotero. See also Michael Bourne, et al., Architecture and Change in the Chesapeake: A Field Tour on the Eastern and Western Shores (Crownsville, MD: Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Maryland Historical Trust Press, 1998), 115–19, view on Zotero.
  11. Robert Key, and architect and carpenter from Annapolis, Maryland, worked on the construction of the plantation house from 1781–98 and may have designed it as well. “Wye House” 2009, 7, view on Zotero.
  12. Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, xv–xvi, view on Zotero; Pruitt, “Transatlantic Roots,” 9, view on Zotero; Russo 1992, 63, view on Zotero.Weeks argues that the ha-ha at Wye House is probably contemporary with the one at Mount Vernon an is “yet another example of how aware the Lloyds were of the latest trends in design, whether architectural or horticultural.” Weeks 1984, 67, view on Zotero.
  13. Mark P. Leone, James M. Harmon, and Jessica L. Neuwirth, “Perspective and Surveillance in Eighteenth-Century Maryland Gardens, including William Paca’s Garden on Wye Island,” Historical Archaeology 39, no. 4 (2005): 139, view on Zotero. See also Pruitt, “Transatlantic Roots,” 8, view on Zotero.
  14. Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, 38, view on Zotero.
  15. “Wye House” 2009, 4–5, view on Zotero; and Pruitt, “Transatlantic Roots,” 5–6, 12, view on Zotero. The federal tax records from 1798, which describe each building at Wye House Plantation, “indicate that there were multiple greenhouse and hothouse buildings operating concurrently on the plantation.” Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, 31, view on Zotero. Analysis of fossil pollen collected from the main rooms of the extant greenhouse reveal that lilies, crocuses, geraniums, pinks, irises, as well as some medicinal plants and other tropical plants were cultivated there. Ibid., 30.
  16. Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, xviii, view on Zotero.
  17. Edwin Wolf II, “The Library of Edward Lloyd IV of Wye House,” Winterthur Portfolio 5 (1969): 90–1; see p. 92–121 for the inventory, view on Zotero.
  18. According to Russo, surviving labor contracts suggest that Edward Lloyd IV hired free laborers to work as gardeners at Wye House during the 1770s and purchased indentured servants to work as gardeners during the same period. Russo notes at least two skilled indentured gardeners who were employed by Lloyd: Peter Moir was purchased to work as a gardener for a period of three years in March 1774 at a price of £30. Lloyd purchased another indentured servant to work as a gardener from James Hutchings in February 1775. Lloyd hired the free gardener Robert Cushney in 1772. Russo 1992, 75–79, view on Zotero. After the 1770s, as Edward IV greatly expanded his enslaved labor force and the number of farms he operated, he relied increasingly on the labor of enslaved workers. The majority performed agricultural labor in Lloyd’s fields. In 1770 there were thirty-three enslaved people at Wye House Plantation, but by 1834 the population had grown to 151 enslaved people. Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, 15, view on Zotero. The Lloyds’ records of the more than five hundred enslaved men, women, and children who lived at Wye House between 1770 and 1834 survive and have been entered into an online searchable database maintained by Archaeology in Annapolis, http://aia.umd.edu/wyehouse/
  19. Pruitt, Reordering the Landscape, 49, view on Zotero.
  20. Mark P. Leone and Lee M. Jenkins, “Introduction: Frederick Douglass and the Transatlantic Classroom,” in Atlantic Crossings in the Wake of Frederick Douglass: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture, edited by Mark P. Leone and Lee M. Jenkins (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2017), xxxv–xxxvi, view on Zotero.
  21. Mark P. Leone, et al., “In the Shade of Frederick Douglass: The Archaeology of Wye House,” Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity, edited by Alfredo González-Ruibal (Milton Park, NY: Routledge, 2013), 223, 226, view on Zotero.

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