photograph of Wye House by Elizabeth Tilghman

Wye House to be the site for the 2016 Meet the Artists Dinner!

The Meet the Artists Dinner is a unique benefit for supporters of Plein Air Easton. The event is an arts experience reminiscent of gilded age paint outs on the great estates of that time. This year the party will occur at Wye House, the home of Beverly & Richard Tilghman. Wye House is considered the most complete example of a late 18th Century plantation remaining in Maryland and one of the most historically important private residences in the United States. 

In addition to the main house, completed about 1790, there are numerous outbuildings, including a stable, smokehouse, dairy, loom house, carriage house and various farm buildings.  The Orangerie (or Greenhouse) is the last fully standing 18th Century one in America, with the center section dating to before 1760.  The Captain’s House, which served as the kitchen for the earlier manor house, dates to about 1720.  

The property upon which Wye House sits was acquired by Edward Lloyd I in 1659.  Lloyd was a Welsh Quaker and a “minor” merchant in London when he decided to emigrate to the Colonies in the late 1640’s.  He settled in Lower Norfolk, Virginia (near present day Smithfield) and soon rose to prominence, becoming a member of the House of Burgesses.  By the early 1650’s, various laws in Virginia against “Non-Conformists,” as the Quakers and Puritans were called, became too much for Lloyd and his fellow Quakers; so they decided to move to Maryland where the Lord Proprietor had espoused “religious freedom” as a way to attract people to his Colony.  Lloyd and his fellow Quakers settled in what is present day Whitehall, across the Severn River from Annapolis, where they built a town they called Providence.  Lloyd quickly became politically close to the “powers that be” in the Colony, soon becoming a member of the Privy Council.  In mid-17th Century Maryland, the population was centered on the Western Shore, and most of the few people who lived on the Eastern Shore had migrated up from the Eastern Shore of Virginia, settling in the lower counties of Eastern Shore Maryland.  In an effort to stimulate settlement on the mid-shore, the Lord Proprietor offered the politically well connected the opportunity to buy land on the Eastern Shore.  Edward Lloyd was quick to realize the opportunity, buying a large tract of land bordering Island Creek and the Choptank River, which he name Hier dire Lloyd (which means “Land of Lloyd” in Welsh Gaelic).  He continued to buy property in the area, including the land today know as Horn Point in Dorchester County.  While his exact motivation for buying the Wye House property in 1659 is not known, it may have been to establish a base of operations in what would become Talbot County or it may have been to avoid the taxing authorities operating along the Choptank River, near present day Oxford.  Whatever the reason, he built the first Eastern Shore residence of the Lloyd family in the early 1660’s on the Wye House property.

Over the next 150 or so years, the Lloyds prospered.  By the time of the Revolution, the first Edward Lloyd’s great-great grandson, Edward IV, had amassed one of the largest fortunes in America, including about 40,000 acres in the mid-shore region.  He built the Chase-Lloyd House in Annapolis in the early 1770’s.  Following the Revolution, he turned his attention to building a Palladian-style mansion on the Wye House property, to replace the house built by his Grandfather in the 1720’s.  He designed the new house himself, with the assistance of the same master craft people that had built the Chase-Lloyd House some 10-15 years earlier.  He furnished his new home with some items from his Grandfather’s house and had several items built by the master Annapolis cabinetmaker, John Shaw.

He was succeeded by his only son, Edward Lloyd V in 1796.  This Edward added the front portico and rear porch as well as the sixth and seventh blocks at either end of the house, turning the house to a seven part one from a five part one.  In the 1820’s, he engaged Edward Priestley,  a prominent Baltimore cabinetmaker, to “modernize” Wye House with various furniture items in the Neo-Classical style, including even a new banister for the main staircase.  Edward V is known in the family as “the Governor” as he served in the Maryland House of Delegates, Maryland Senate, from which he was elected Governor in 1809.  Thereafter, he served two terms in the United States Senate, resigning for health reasons in 1834 (most likely gout).  Of note is the fact that one of Edward’s plantation overseers, Captain Aaron Anthony, brought Frederick Douglass at age 6 to Wye House in about 1822.  Frederick stayed at Wye for about three years, during which time he served as companion and servant to Daniel Lloyd, Edward V’s youngest son. 

By the early 1830’s, agriculture was no longer a profitable enterprise in Maryland.  Edward VI sought to expand the Lloyd family’s fortunes to Mississippi and Louisiana, to take advantage of “king cotton.”  He purchased substantial lands along the Mississippi River in the 1830’s and 1840’s, which allowed the family to remain affluent until the Civil War.  As was the case with most plantation owners, the Civil War was catastrophic to their way of life and livelihood. The last of the slave-era owners of Wye House, Edward Lloyd VII, inherited huge war debts and increased the property’s mortgage debt in an effort to keep the farming operation going.  His oldest son, Edward VIII opted for a naval career, graduating from the Naval Academy in 1874, and retiring in the 1920’s with the rank of Commander (one star Admiral).  Luckily, the second son, Charles Howard Lloyd, married a wealthy Baltimore lady, Mary Donnell, and was able to acquire Wye House from his father by repaying all the mortgage debt on the property.  The property descended to Charles Howard’s and Mary Donnell’s daughter, Elizabeth Key Lloyd Schiller, who moved to Wye House just after World War II.  Elizabeth died in 1993, at which point, the property descended to Mary Donnell Singer Tilghman, the daughter of Elizabeth Schiller’s sister, Joanna Lloyd Hughes , and the husband of Richard Carmichael Tilghman, MD.  When Mrs. Tilghman died in 2012, she left the Wye House property to her eldest son, Richard C. Tilghman, Jr., who is the 12th generation Lloyd to own the property.  His daughter and nephew stand to inherit the property after his death. His nephew lives in one of the tenant houses on the property with his wife and two children.  Thus, the 12th, 13th and 14th generations of Lloyds currently live on the property.

A half mile double allee of beech and oak trees planted in 1892 by Charles Howard Lloyd leads to the Palladian-style Wye House, with its Cypress clapboards, painted yellow since the early 18th century.  The symmetrical façade is reminiscent of the Palladian villas of 16th century Italy and the country estates of 17th century England.  North of the manor house stands the Orangerie, where many generations of Lloyds kept citrus fruit and various tropical plants warm in the winter.  Beyond the Orangerie behind a brick wall is the Lloyd family graveyard, with the oldest graves dating to the mid 1660’s.  This is the most extensive private cemetery still extant in Maryland.  The Orangerie and graveyard are protected in perpetuity by an easement held by Preservation Maryland.  The lands surrounding Wye House are protected by conservation easements held by the Maryland Environmental Trust and the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy. 

Many of the contents of Wye House are original, including large portions of the libraries of Edward Lloyd IV and V, several pieces of furniture crafted by John Shaw in the late 18th century, a number of pieces crafted by Edward Priestley in the 19th century (most notably a 13 foot dining table), a few pieces from the earlier house, and a number of works of art from the late 18th century.

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