The McTyeire Tea Service

This tea set is engraved to: “Amelia McTyeire from the Methodists of New Orleans, 1858.” 

The service was given to Mrs. McTyeire to commemorate her and her husband Holland Nimmons McTyeire’s ten-year posting to New Orleans as a Methodist Episcopal Church, South minister. The couple had tirelessly ministered to their congregation in New Orleans during the hard years of the yellow fever epidemics. They left New Orleans to move to Nashville where Holland McTyeire continued his work for the Methodist church and was ordained as a bishop in 1866.

Later in the early 1870’s Amelia McTyeire and her cousin Frank Armstrong Vanderbilt, second wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt, would introduce their husbands to each other and the result would be a gift from Commodore Vanderbilt for the founding of what would become Vanderbilt University. 

[Amelia Townsend McTyeire]
Photograph, c. 1870’s
John James Tigert, IV Papers
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

[McTyeire Four-Piece Tea Service]
Edgar Eoff and Georg L. Shepard, Silversmiths
New York, c. 1858
Vanderbilt University Silver Collection

This four-piece coin silver tea service was made by Edgar Eoff and Georg L. Shepard Silversmiths of New York City and sold by Henderson and Gaines of New Orleans.

Coin silver is, as the name suggests, material created from silver dollars and other silver currency.  It contains ninety percent pure silver.In 1993 this tea service was given to Vanderbilt University by descendants of the McTyeire family as a memorial to Holland McTyeire Thompson.