Marley

Marley was ‘a small plantation’ ‘in the wildest district of the St Mary’s Mountains’. Marley Hall was ‘situated on an eminence, about two hundred feet above the [sugar] works’ (perhaps for defence). An ‘extensive garden’, enclosed with fruit-trees and laid out with flowerpots, was ‘visible on the only level spot in front of the house’. Below the eminence, the huts of the enslaved were ‘at some little distance from the house’.

In 1804, Marley (possibly with nearby Derry) was estimated to be worth £2000 p.a. to its owner, minor Robert Lyon, gained under devise from a paternal uncle. This compared to £133 p.a. from his Roscommon estate which had descended from father.

The innumerable creditors of later owner Larchin Lynch ‘utterly dismantled’ Marley: ‘the machinery of the sugar-works was pulled down, and sold’; leaving ‘a desolate house! A heap of ruins! And a wide tract of waste land around them!’ In 1834, Madden reported the huts of the enslaved ‘were all uninhabited; the roofs of some of them had tumbled in’. Inside Marley Hall ‘every plank in the naked room was crumbling into decay’.

The house was occupied by a very old mulatto woman and her two daughters Dolly and Kitty, aged about 40 and 38, fathered by former Marley owner Theodius [i.e. Theophilus] Lyons [or less likely the Doctor] (with striking resemblance to some of Madden’s family members); and two younger white women, natural daughters of recent owner Larchin Gordon (d.1825). The Lyons group ‘had received nothing but bad treatment… for 40 years since the death of their natural protector, who, dying suddenly, left them utterly unprovided for’, lingering ‘on the property, dragging out a miserable existence’ on the abandoned property. Gordon had turned them out, but they retook possession after Lynch’s departure and co-existed peacefully with Gordon’s daughters.

We are grateful to Steven Carter for his assistance in compiling this entry.

Richard Robert Madden, A Twelvemonth's Residence in the West Indies,Vol. 1. James Cochrane and Co., 1835, pp. 221, 230-235. British Newspaper Archive, The Sun (London), 2 August 1804, p. 4.