"Procured of the best and most fashionable materials": the furniture and furnishings of the Lloyd Family, 1750-1850
Date
1999
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Edward Lloyd family of Wye House, Talbot County, Maryland, was one of Maryland’s most powerful families. Edward Lloyd I received a land grant on the Wye River in 1659 and began to operate a tobacco plantation. The succeeding generations of oldest sons, all named Edward except for one, managed the expanding plantation and served the colony and state of Maryland in some political capacity until 1894. Their wealth and land accumulated at an exponential rate and, correspondingly, their social and political influence. Although aspects of the Lloyd family have been studied by historians, their furniture and furnishing purchases have never been examined. The Lloyd family’s continued residence at Wye House has preserved a large amount of the furniture, which provided access to the objects for the purpose of intense primary research. The family papers, which were donated by the family to the Maryland Historical Society, supplied documentation for the objects and context for the Lloyds’s cultural and economic motivation for their purchases. This thesis analyzes (1) the purchasing patterns for the furnishings that decorated the homes of the Edward Lloyd family from 1750-1850 and (2) the furniture of the Edward Lloyd family that survives at Wye House or is known to have been used at Wye House or the Annapolis townhouse between 1750 and 1850.