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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]

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.


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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.
  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.

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