Site
26080 Bruffs Island Rd
Eston, MD 21601
Wye House is located on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It is privately owned and not open to the public. The main house, its outbuildings, and surrounding acreage compose a plantation originally established in the 17th century.
( for Tappers Corner) Easternshore.com
People of Wye House - searchable database of the enslaved people of the Wye House Plantation between 1770 and 1826
Society of Architectural Historians
Clio - historical property database
National Gallery of Art - Early American Landscape Design
History
The Wye plantation was created in the 1650s by a Welsh Puritan and wealthy planter, Edward Lloyd. Between 1780 and 1790, the main house was built by his great-great-grandson, Edward Lloyd IV, using the profits generated by the forced labor of enslaved people. It is cited as an example between the transition of Georgian and Federal architecture, which is attributed to builder Robert Key. Nearby the house is an orangery, a rare survival of an early garden structure where orange and lemon trees were cultivated, and which still contains its original 18th-century heating system of hot-air ducts. During its peak, the plantation's owners enslaved more than 1,000 people to work lands that totaled more than 42,000 acres (17,000 ha). Though the land has shrunk to 1,300 acres (530 ha) today, it is still owned by the descendants of Edward Lloyd, now in their 11th generation on the property.
Frederick Douglass was enslaved on the plantation, from around the ages of seven and eight, and spoke extensively of the brutal conditions of the plantation in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
When Frederick Douglass was 7 or 8 years old he was taken by his grandmother, Betsey Bailey, to the Great House in the Wye Plantation about twelve miles from his birthplace, Holmes Hill Farm. Here Douglass was left on his own for the first time. It was common practice to bring young slaves who were too young to work in the plantations to the main house to do house and yard work. In his autobiographies he describes how for the first time in his life he experienced the brutal treatment of slaves by Aaron Anthony. Young Frederick Douglass lived in this house less than a year before he was given to the Auld family in Baltimore as a companion to their toddler son, Thomas.