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History of Early American Landscape Design

Wye House

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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]



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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.

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History of Early American Landscape Design contributors, "Wye House," History of Early American Landscape Design, , https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php?title=Wye_House&oldid=36363 (accessed March 29, 2024).

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